Part of a Falcon 9 rocket likely to hit the Moon in March

The second stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is expected to hit the Moon. According to experts, in March, after a seven-year odyssey around the Earth and the Moon, the four-ton part will hit the Earth’s satellite at a speed of about 2.6 km / s.

This will be the first time that any part of the rocket has accidentally hit the Moon. The first stage of the Falcon 9 will be returned to Earth in a controlled manner and reused. SpaceX originally planned to reuse the second stage as well, but hasn’t found a viable solution for this. Therefore, the stage is usually arranged to return to Earth and burn up upon entering Earth’s atmosphere. In this case, however, there was not enough fuel left.

Earlier this month, astronomer Bill Gray called on colleagues and hobbyists to make their own observations. Based on the data they presented, they expect the rocket stage to hit the Moon on March 4. He also published the expected coordinates on his weblogwhich are closer to the lunar equator.

tumbling part

Accurate prediction could allow lunar satellites such as NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and India’s Chandrayaan-2 to focus on the impact and collect data. NASA made such a plan in 2009 when they struck a rocket part with a mass of 2.4 tons in a crater area near the South Pole on the Moon’s surface and created a cloud of material. After some time, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, which was to analyze the nature of the cloud, flew through this cloud. Astronomer Jonathan McDowell Twitter confirms March 4 date, The event was “interesting, but no big deal”.

The second stage was part of the Falcon 9 that launched NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite in February 2015. Gray writes that he has a purely mathematical model of how the gravity of the Earth, Moon, Sun and planets would affect him. He also has an idea of ​​how sunlight moves part of the rocket, but this is made more difficult by the fact that it collapses.

(nw)