Elon Musk activates SpaceX Starlink service over Ukraine
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The scientists who first predicted the impact warn that the discarded rocket part is just hours away from crashing into the Moon. The rocket part, which weighs three tonnes and is hurtling through space at 5,800mph, has been tipped to strike the surface at 12:25 on Friday. Originally, experts believed that an errant hurtling towards the moon came from Elon Musk’s rockets.
The second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has been floating around in space for the past seven years in a somewhat chaotic orbit.
In January, Bill Gray, an astronomer who writes the widely used Project Pluto software, called out for amateur and professional astronomers to make additional observations of the rocket and refine his calculations.
However, last month he clarified that he actually made an error identifying the rocket.
He now thinks that the rocket is a part of a Long March 3C rocket that launched China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission that went to the Moon in October 2014.
This rocket was a predecessor to Chang’e 5, which launched in 2020 and was able to return with a robotic lunar sample.
The impact from the collision on the Moon is expected to be minor.
However, scientists are eager to use the opportunity to study the 10-20m-wide crater it is likely to form, along with the plumes of moon dust kick up on impact.
Mr Gray has noted that this is the first unintentional case of a rocket striking the Moon.
The discarded rocket is part of the growing concern over space debris, which experts believe could become a major problem in the near future.
Space entrepreneur Daniel Ceperley warned that a growing number of fragments from crashed military and commercial satellites has made operating in large areas of space “more expensive and riskier”.
Mr Ceperley previously told Express.co.uk: “In 2009, we saw this Iridium-Cosmos collision, a dead satellite and a commercial satellite collided and created 1000s of pieces of debris, just in an instant.
“Two satellites were turned into 1000s of pieces of debris, and a lot of that debris is still up there in space.
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