Photo When space debris crashed into the moon earlier this year, they made not one, but two craters on the lunar surface, judging by images revealed by NASA on Friday.
Astronomers predicted that a mysterious object would reach the moon on March 4 after tracking the debris for months. The object was large and was believed to be a worn-out rocket propellant from the Long March 3C vehicle of the National Space Administration of China that launched the Chang’e 5-T1 spacecraft in 2014.
The details are vague. Space agencies tend to monitor garbage closer to home and don’t really watch for what might be dropping other planetary objects. It was difficult to confirm the nature of the accident; experts calculated that it would probably leave a crater behind. Now, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has detected telltale signs of a surface impact. Images taken by the probe reveal a strange peanut shell-shaped hole on the surface of the Moon, presumably caused by Chinese garbage.
Peanut-like craters … Image credit: NASA / Goddard / Arizona State University
“Surprisingly, the crater is actually two craters, an eastern crater (18 meters in diameter, about 19.5 meters) superimposed on a western crater (16 meters in diameter, about 17.5 meters),” NASA said. No other lunar rocket body collision has ever created two craters we know of. The strange ditch suggests that what struck the Moon had a peculiar structure.
“The double crater was unexpected and may indicate that the rocket’s body had large masses at each end. Normally, a worn rocket has mass concentrated at the end of the engine; the rest of the rocket stage consists mainly of a tank. “Since the origin of the rocket’s body remains uncertain, the dual nature of the crater may indicate its identity,” the US space agency added.
Bill Gray, a software developer for professional astronomers who first predicted the impact, mistakenly thought the object was a rogue part of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched by the Climate Observatory. NASA Deep Space. He later changed his mind and still believes it is from China’s Long March 3C rocket.
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“I’m a little baffled by the appearance of the double crater. But I’m by no means an expert on high-speed impacts, except to know that they can have very strange results. In any case, I’m very glad that the people of LRO was able to locate that, ”he said.
“I can’t say the double crater proves things one way or another,” he told The Register. “This bit is a headache. I don’t think that tells us anything about whether it’s the Chang’e 5-T1 booster. We basically have it from other information. And the selenologists, who know a lot more. crater formation than I can find a completely different reason for how perfectly normal rocket hardware could generate twin craters. “
Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, denied that part of the space debris was from the rocket launched by the Chang’e 5 spacecraft in 2020. “According to China’s monitoring, the stage top of the Chang’e-5 mission The rocket has safely fallen through the Earth’s atmosphere and burned completely, “it said in a statement earlier.
But this rocket is not the same as astronomers believe hit the Moon. Gray believes it was from a different vehicle, one that launched the Chang’e 5-T1 spacecraft in 2014. His predictions of where he might impact the object with the Moon were a few kilometers away. “The actual location of the impact was uncertain about a dozen miles, largely because our last observations were made about four weeks before the impact,” he said.
“The problem was that spaceships and space debris are gently pushed by sunlight, in a way that depends on how the objects are oriented as they fall from end to end. It’s a small push, but during the four weeks, we knew it could push the object a dozen miles one way or another, in a wrong direction.It’s a bit like predicting where an empty garbage bag will go in a windstorm.You know that s ‘will wind up, but not exactly where it is “. aniré. “®