Right at the end of January reports, including our own, surfaced in which it was alleged that a SpaceX rocket was on a collision course with the Moon. The rocket was set to impact on 4th March and while that impact is still expected, it wasn’t a SpaceX rocket that was destined to hit the Moon.
The piece of space junk that will hit the Moon next month is now believed to be the booster stage of China’s Chang’e 5-T1. So how did SpaceX and China get mixed up? The short answer is that there is a lot of junk in space, including man-made objects. The longer answer is simply a case of mistaken identity.
Following the publication of a correction by astronomer Bill Gray, who develops the Project Pluto software used by amateur and professional astronomers, outlines the events that lead to him identifying the object as part of the DSCOVR second stage.
A month after DSCOVR was launched in 2015, a possible near-Earth asteroid was spotted via the Cataline Sky Survey. The asteroid was given the name WE0913A. Shortly after this discovery a Brazilian astronomer noted that the object was orbiting Earth and not the Sun pointing to the possibility it may be a man-made object.
At this stage Gray suggested it may be DSCOVR or part of the craft, but had problems finding data on DSCOVR’s trajectory.
“Further data confirmed that yes, WE0913A had gone past the moon two days after DSCOVR’s launch, and I and others came to accept the identification with the second stage as correct. The object had about the brightness we would expect, and had showed up at the expected time and moving in a reasonable orbit,” writes Gray.
An email from Jon Giorgini at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory prompted Gray to look at his findings one more time.
The astronomer noted that if the object was indeed DSCOVR its behaviour would have had to have been mighty unusual for it to be headed for the Moon. Instead, the trajectory appears to match the Chang’e 5-T1 mission’s booster which would have passed the Moon at the right time to be consistent with reports of a possible impact in March.
“In a sense, this remains ‘circumstantial’ evidence. But I would regard it as fairly convincing evidence. So I am persuaded that the object about to hit the moon on 2022 Mar 4 at 12:25 UTC is actually the Chang’e 5-T1 rocket stage.
We highly recommend reading Gray’s blog here where he lays out his original hypothesis as well as his latest observations that lead to the theory above.
While a mistake was made, it speaks to just how much junk there is in space alongside the asteroids other objects of concern. That problem is only going to get larger and we need to start having a serious conversation about space junk and how we deal with it.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
