A rocket hit the Moon on March 4, 2022, creating a double crater.
Image: NASA / Goddard / Arizona State University
Astronomers have finally identified the site of impact of a mysterious rocket that curiously created two craters on the dark side of the Moon.
Part of the rocket hit the Moon on March 4, but astronomers only reported the discovery of the impact site last week. There is now an eastern crater on the Moon about 18 meters in diameter (19.5 yards) that overlaps a western crater 16 meters in diameter (17.5 yards).
According to NASA, the double crater may indicate that the rocket’s body had large masses at each end. So far, no other rocket collision on the Moon has created double craters, even though the Apollo SIV-B craters were larger.
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Neither NASA nor any other astronomer has been able to confirm which nation or company the rocket was from.
“Typically, a spent rocket has too much concentrated at the end of the engine; the rest of the rocket stage consists primarily of an empty fuel tank,” said Mark Robinson, a professor at the School of Earth Exploration. and Arizona State University Space, at NASA. Press release.
“Because the origin of the rocket’s body remains uncertain, the dual nature of the crater may indicate its identity.”
Robinson is also the principal investigator of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera and a new NASA lunar imaging experiment called ShadowCam.
According to the New York Times, in January it was speculated that the rocket part was the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 that was launched in 2015 on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for its “DSCOVR” Deep Space project. Climate Observatory. But this was later ruled out.
Bill Gray, the developer of astronomical software Project Pluto, first detected the rocket in January and was tracking it as it approached the moon.
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January raised, Ars Technica reported, that it was part of the Falcon 9, but a NASA engineer said the launch trajectory did not fit with the rocket’s orbit.
Gray later concluded that the likely candidate was a Long March 3C rocket launched from China in 2014.
But China’s foreign ministry said in a statement on February 21 that “the upper stage of the rocket related to the Chang’e-5 mission entered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned completely.”
Gray disagrees with China’s assessment and believes that “two different but similarly named lunar missions” were mixed.
He also argues that some official agency like the U.S. Space Force, or potentially some international agency, should track spacecraft in outer space, not just objects like asteroids in lower orbit.
“Many more spacecraft are now entering high orbits, and some of them will carry crews to the moon. This garbage will no longer be just a nuisance for a small group of astronomers,” Gray wrote in his blog on the Pluto Project .