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SPACEX DOES NOT MARK THE SPOT —


ASTRONOMERS NOW SAY THE ROCKET ABOUT TO STRIKE THE MOON IS NOT A FALCON 9


IT'S PROBABLE THAT THE IMPACT OBJECT COMES FROM A CHINESE ROCKET LAUNCHED IN
2014.

Eric Berger - 2/13/2022, 2:10 AM

Enlarge / The Moon is safe from Falcon 9 rockets.
NASA

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About three weeks ago Ars Technica first reported that astronomers were tracking
the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, and were increasingly confident that it
would strike the Moon on March 4.

This story set off a firestorm of media activity. Much of this coverage
criticized SpaceX for failing to properly dispose of the second stage of its
Falcon 9 rocket after the launch of NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory
mission, or DSCOVR, in 2015. The British tabloids, in particular, had a field
day. Even the genteel European Space Agency tut-tutted, noting that it takes
care to preserve enough fuel to put spent rocket stages into stable orbits
around the Sun.


FURTHER READING

After 7 years, a spent Falcon 9 rocket stage is on course to hit the Moon

However, it turns out we were all wrong. A Falcon 9 rocket is not going to, in
fact, strike the Moon next month. Instead, it's probably a Chinese rocket.

Bill Gray, who writes the widely used Project Pluto software to track near-Earth
objects and was the original source for the Falcon 9 hitting the Moon story,
acknowledged the error on his website Saturday. He explained that, back in 2015,
he and other observers found an unidentified object in the sky and gave it a
temporary name, WE0913A. Further observations suggested it probably was a
human-made object, and soon the second stage of the rocket used to launch DSCOVR
became a prime candidate.

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"I thought it was either DSCOVR or some bit of hardware associated with it,"
Gray wrote Saturday. "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."

This might have been a harmless, and entirely unnoticed error until astronomers
found that this object was about to strike the Moon. Suddenly the potential for
an errant Falcon 9 rocket—after all, Elon Musk is a global celebrity—was big
news around the world.

It was an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jon Giorgini, who
realized this object was not in fact the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. He
wrote to Gray on Saturday morning explaining that the DSCOVR spacecraft's
trajectory did not go particularly close to the Moon, and that it would
therefore be a little strange if the second stage strayed close enough to strike
it. This prompted Gray to dig back into his data, and identify other potential
candidates.

He soon found one—the Chinese Chang'e 5-T1 mission launched in October 2014 on a
Long March 3C rocket. This lunar mission sent a small spacecraft to the Moon as
a precursor test for an eventual lunar sample return mission. The launch time
and lunar trajectory are almost an exact match for the orbit of the object that
will hit the Moon in March.

"In a sense, this remains 'circumstantial' evidence," Gray wrote. "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."


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HOW THE NES CONQUERED A SKEPTICAL AMERICA IN 1985




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Eric Berger Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering
everything from astronomy to private space to NASA, and author of the book
Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in
Houston.
Email eric.berger@arstechnica.com // Twitter @SciGuySpace

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