Unfortunately, the rocket that will hit the moon turns out to have China


 Last month, an astronomer said SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket would hit the Moon after seven years of drifting in space. Now the astronomer has changed his prediction and says that the rocket that will hit the Moon is actually Chinese.

The update comes from Bill Gray, an astronomer and asteroid tracker, who has been following the object's journey since March 2015. He said the object was first discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey, a program that uses telescopes near Tucson, Arizona to search for potentially dangerous asteroids.


Was mistaken for a natural space object, Gray finally confirmed that this was a man-made object because it orbited the Earth. He also gave the code WE0913A for this mysterious object.




Thanks to some clues, Gray and other astronomers thought that this object was the upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that launched in February 2015 to carry the DSCOVR satellite. The rocket apparently passed the Moon just two days after the DSCOVR mission was launched.


Gray admitted that the process of identifying space objects is not always solid. He later realized his mistake when he received an email from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee tracking active space missions.





JPL has its own tracking system, and the JPL employee argued that the chances of Falcon 9 passing by the Moon just two days after DSCOVR's launch were very slim because its trajectory was not heading any closer to the Moon.


So Gray is looking for what launch mission this object is compatible with. He later discovered the Chang'e 5-TI mission which was launched in October 2014.


This is a mission that China launched as a test run of the Chang'e 5 mission launched in 2020 to bring home samples from the Moon. The 2014 mission was launched on a Long March 3C rocket.



After reconstructing the mission's orbit and trajectory, Gray realized that the Long March 3C rocket that launched the Chang'e 5-TI mission was the most suitable mission for this mysterious object, not SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.


"I think we can say that we have a very strong chain of evidence," Gray said, as quoted by The Verge, Monday (14/2/2022).


"Re-examining the launch orbit for the Chinese spacecraft makes quite a bit of sense. It ends up in an orbit passing the Moon at the exact time after launch," he concluded.

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