A hunk of a rocket ended its seven-year odyssey in space last week. Precisely on March 4, 2022, the space debris finally hit the Moon.
The event occurred at 07:25 EST (1225 GMT) on the far side of the Moon, experts said. That is, the event is not visible to ground-based telescopes. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter may not have been in the right position to see the crash.
But they promised to find out the crater caused by the incident. So far it is not known how big the hole or crater caused by the collision was.
The crater, according to Scientific American, is somewhat close to Hertzsprung Crater, a 570-kilometer-wide crater that forms naturally on the Moon.
Quoted from Space.com, Monday (7/3/2022) this collision marks the first known accidental lunar collision involving space hardware. Where exactly the rocket debris came from is still a matter of debate.
The mystery of the origin of space junk
Initial analysis pointed to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, although later identification identified a Chinese launcher as the origin. However, China denies this. Their side illustrates how difficult it is to track small objects far from Earth.
The first known prediction of the impact of a space debris collision on the Moon came from astronomer Bill Gray who runs the Project Pluto program. Preliminary calculations by Gray and his team suggest that the impactor was the top of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite in February 2015.
However, Gray later corrected his analysis after discussions with other astronomers, including Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who usually tracks satellites and space debris. Gray's work and several other independent observations now suggest that the object was actually part of the Long March 3C rocket that launched the China Chang'e 5-T1 mission in 2014.
Chang'e-5-T1 is the technology of the Chang'e 5 mission which brought samples of the Moon back to Earth in December 2020. But as already mentioned, China denied it. Initially, United States Space Force data supported this denial by showing that the object had re-entered Earth's atmosphere in 2015.
But US Space Force officials recently denied to SpaceNews that Chang'e 5-T1 did not deviate from orbit at that time. Claims that re-entry to Earth are declared false tracking data.
What is clear, this event could be part of new research. Astronomers are eager to discover and study the new craters resulting from the collision to learn more about the composition of the near surface and the structure of the Moon's mysterious far side.
Is it true that it was a former Chinese rocket? Maybe it should be checked at the location directly.