The rocket that will crash into the moon is not from SpaceX after all

The rocket made headlines in January after flying over the month. According to the calculations of astronomers, it turned out that the object was on a collision course with the moon. Bill Gray, creator of sky observation software Pluto Projectthen used data from the crowd to calculate that the rocket stage would crash there on March 4.

At the time, experts believed it was a Falcon9 rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX company launched in February 2015. Gray reports now that it is highly unlikely to be the SpaceX rocket. Gray says it’s likely to be a stopover instead of China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission, the predecessor to the Chinese probe that brought a piece of the moon back to Earth in 2020.

no hard evidence

Gray says he originally thought it was the SpaceX rocket from the DSCOVRthe mission went because the object could be seen near the moon two days after the launch of this mission. Other astronomers thought the same, so even though there was no hard evidence, they assumed it was SpaceX’s rocket.

New data now shows that this is highly unlikely. According to astronomer Jon Giorgini, the DSCOVR rocket was far from the moon at the time. This prompted Gray to rethink what the object might be.

Ultimately, he calculated that the object was probably part of the Chinese Chang’e 5T1 missile. This mission was launched in October 2013, but so far no one had recovered the piece of space junk. Gray says the object is still on a collision course with the moon.

Space waste is increasingly a problem

Waste in space is becoming a growing problem. For example, NASA spokespersons said last week that they were concerned about Elon Musk’s numerous Starlink satellites. It happened after SpaceX lost some 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm. According to the company, they simply burned up in the atmosphere, so they would not have created space junk.

China also criticized SpaceX for the same reason last year. However, the country has had problems with objects dropped in space before. Late last year, the ISS even had to remove pieces of an abandoned Chinese satellite Dodge†

There are according to ESA already more than 36,500 objects larger than 10 centimeters in orbit around the Earth. Some astronomers say it could be space junk enormous consequences have for the future of space travel.