TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – About three weeks it was reported that astronomers were tracking the upper stages rocket Falcon 9, and it is estimated that the rocket will hit the Moon on March 4.
This story set off a storm of media activity. Much of this coverage criticized SpaceX for failing to dispose of the rocket Falcon 9 the second phase following the launch of the NOAA Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, mission in 2015.
British tabloids, in particular, made fun of him. Even the polite European Space Agency commented, noting that care was needed to conserve enough fuel to put the spent rocket stage into stable orbit around the Sun.
However, the report turned out to be wrong. Falcon 9 rocket actually won’t hit the Moon next month. Instead, it may be a Chinese rocket, as reported by Ars Technica, Sunday, February 13, 2022.
Bill Gray, who wrote the Project Pluto software widely used to track near-Earth objects and was the original source of the story about Falcon 9 hitting the Moon, acknowledged the error on his website on Saturday.
He explained that in 2015, he and other observers found an unidentified object in the sky and gave it a temporary name, WE0913A. Further observations indicated that it might be a man-made object, and soon the second stage of the rocket used to launch the DSCOVR became the prime candidate.
“I think it’s the DSCOVR or the hardware associated with it,” Gray wrote on Saturday. “Further data confirms that yes, WE0913A has crossed the moon two days after DSCOVR’s launch, and I and others accept the identification with the second stage as correct. The object has the brightness we expected, and has appeared at the predicted time and is moving in orbit. reasonable.”
This was probably a harmless error, and was not realized at all until astronomers discovered that this object was about to hit the Moon. Suddenly the false potential of the Falcon 9 rocket made big news all over the world.
It was an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jon Giorgini, who realized that this object was not actually the top of the Falcon 9 rocket. He wrote to Gray on Saturday morning explaining that the DSCOVR spacecraft’s trajectory was not very close to the Moon, and would therefore be slightly off. strange if the second stage diverged close enough to attack him. This prompted Gray to dig into his data again, and identify other potential candidates.
He soon found it—the Chinese mission Chang’e 5-T1 launched in October 2014 on a Long March 3C rocket. This lunar mission sent a small spacecraft to the Moon as a preliminary test for a lunar sample return mission. The launch timing and trajectory of the moon is almost exactly the same as the orbit of the object that will hit the Moon in March.
“In a sense, this remains ‘indirect’ evidence,” Gray wrote. “But I would take it as pretty convincing evidence. So I believe that the object that will hit the moon on March 4, 2022 at 12:25 UTC is actually the Chang’e 5-T1 rocket stage.”
ARS TECHNICA
Read:
SpaceX’s Booster Rocket Will Hit the Moon on March 4
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