Jakarta –
Falcon 9 rocket owned by SpaceX will crash Month after spending seven years bobbing in space. The rocket was first launched from Florida in February 2015 to carry a space weather satellite.
The satellite carrying the rocket is the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a joint project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA. DSCOVR monitors the weather in space from the Lagrange 1 point, about 1.5 million km from Earth to the sun.
The part of the rocket that will hit the Moon is the second stage, which separates it from the booster to carry the payload into position. Now the rocket is too far away and doesn’t have enough fuel to return to Earth, but it also doesn’t have the energy to escape the gravity of the Earth and Moon.
“So the rocket has been following a rather chaotic orbit since February 2015,” said meteorologist Eric Berger, as quoted by The Guardian, Friday (28/1/2022).
According to data from Bill Gray, a space observer and maker of software that tracks space objects, the four-ton rocket will hit the Moon at a speed of 2.58 km/s. The rocket is predicted to fall on the far side of the Moon on March 4, 2022.
Rocket crash site SpaceX which is definitely still difficult to determine due to various factors. Regarding whether this rocket collision will be observable from Earth, Gray said it most likely will not.
“Most of the Moon was obscuring, and even if the rocket was on the near side, the collision occurred a few days after New Moon,” Gray said.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist from Harvard University, confirmed this unique phenomenon. McDowell said the collision was interesting but not a big deal in terms of impact.
Even so, space observers believe this collision will provide a lot of valuable data. The impact of this collision will most likely create a new crater on the Moon’s surface.
It is therefore important to know the exact location and schedule of the collision, so that this unique event can be observed by space probes orbiting the Moon such as NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and India’s Chandrayaan 2.
It’s the first time rocket SpaceX hit the Moon, but this isn’t the first time a man-made object has hit Earth’s natural satellite. In 2019, Israel’s Beresheet spacecraft went into free fall while trying to land on the Moon.
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