The moon's surface will be reached a bit ahead of schedule.
The first crewed touchdown of NASA's Artemis lunar exploration program is a milestone that the agency hopes to achieve in 2025. It will hit the dirt in just five weeks.
The upper stage of a rocket will slam into the moon on March 4, according to a report by Eric Berger. Bill Gray is the founder of Project Pluto, a company that supplies software to professional and amateur astronomer.
There are pictures of the evolution of the rockets.
The Deep Space Climate Observatory was launched by a rocket. Our planet and the space weather environment can be studied from the Earth-sun Lagrange Point 1 (L1). L2 is 930,000 miles from Earth in the other direction, and is where the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope just arrived.
After launch, the upper stages of the Falcon 9 are usually sent back into the atmosphere for a fiery death. SpaceX reuses the first stages of its rockets. The first success came in December 2015; the company had yet to pull off a first-stage touchdown.
After sending DSCOVR on its way, the upper stage was so high that it didn't have enough fuel to return to its home planet. It has been in the Earth-moon system for seven years.
Its time is about to end. Gray calculated that the stage will crash into the moon on March 4 at 7:25 a.m. The time is 1225 GMT. The impact will take place on the lunar farside, at a latitude of 4.93 degrees north and a longitude of 233.20 degrees east.
At a guess, the above prediction may be wrong by a degree or two minutes from the predicted time.
We will need more observations in February to refine the prediction and bring the uncertainty down.
The impact won't be visible from Earth because it will occur on the moon's farside. If we can nail down its time and location, we can potentially allow moon-orbiting missions such as NASA's LRO and India's Chandrayaan 2 to study the resulting crater.
Gray's calculations have been confirmed by others.
The old Falcon 9 second stage is going to hit the moon on March 4. It is interesting, but not a big deal, according to astronomer and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.
He said that objects left in the cislunar will either hit the moon or the Earth.
The upcoming impact will be the first example of a planned destruction if the dynamics hold true.
The upcoming impact will be the first lunar RUD for the company, not the first overall, according to Insprucker. Over the years, many spaceships have accidentally hit the moon. Israel's Beresheet probe and the Chandrayaan 2 lander both crashed during their attempts to land on the moon.
The moon crashes the most.
First example of a Regolith Unplanned Disassembly if orbital dynamics holds true. https://t.co/Ujhw4pmuKHJanuary 25, 2022
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The first rocket body to hit the moon will not be the Falcon 9 upper stage. During the Apollo program, NASA steered the upper stages of multiple Saturn V rockets into the moon. In 2009, the agency crashed the upper stage of the Atlas V rocket that was used to launch LRO into a crater on the moon.
The impact blasted out a lot of water ice, suggesting that it is plentiful on the moon.
Gray wrote that the Falcon 9 stage is headed for a boring part of the moon. It could still yield interesting insights about lunar geology.
We know the mass of an empty Falcon 9 booster and that it will hit at 2.58 km/s [5,700 mph, or 9,290 kph], and the known energy of the object making the crater should help in calibrating the crater.
Mike Wall is the author of Out There, a book about the search for alien life. You can follow him on social media. Follow us on social media.
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