A rogue rocket stage is going to crash into the moon on Friday.
There will be an event at 7:25 a.m. It will not be seen by ground-based telescopes on the lunar far side. NASA will not be able to see the crash, but they will try to find the crater, which could take weeks or months.
According to Scientific American, the crater will be close to the naturally formed Hertzsprung Crater.
It will be the first known accidental lunar collision involving a piece of space hardware, not counting the probes that have crashed while trying to land on the moon. During multiple Apollo missions, NASA deliberately steered the third stages of the moon rockets into the lunar surface.
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Are you able to see the rocket stage?
Let us know if you see the rocket stage in a telescope. Comments and images can be sent to spacephotos@space.com.
There is a debate about where the rocket stage came from. Initial analyses pointed to a Chinese rocket, but later it was found that was the origin. China has shown how hard it is to find small objects far away.
Bill Gray, who runs the Pluto Project program that tracks space objects, made the first known prediction of the coming moon impact. Gray and others suggested that the object is the upper stage of the rocket that launched the Deep Space Climate Observatory.
Gray later corrected his analysis after discussing it with other astronomer, including Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer. Several independent observations and the work of Gray suggest that the object is part of the Long March 3C rocket that was used to launch the Chang'e 5-T1 mission.
The technology demonstrator of the Chang'e 5 mission was Chang'e-5-T1, which brought a sample of the moon back to Earth in December 2020. The United States Space Force initially backed up the idea that the moon-bound stage was from their country, but China denies that. Space Force officials recently told SpaceNews that the Chang'e 5-T1 stage did not deorbit after all, as Gray had suggested.
It is a complicated story that could go on for a long time. Astronomers want to find and study the new crater to learn more about the lunar far side.
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