After mistaken identity and confusion, a piece of space junk slams into the Moon

A piece of a Chinese rocket slammed into the Moon today, just as space tracking experts expected. If the law of gravity hasn't changed, it should have hit the Moon around 7:30AM this morning. A new crater on the Moon is likely to be up to 65 feet wide after the collision brought an end to the rocket's life in space.

This past month, the now-expired rocket has caused quite a buzz. The vehicle was never intended to crash into the Moon, so it is a rare piece of space debris to find its way to the lunar surface. Various groups were trying to figure out where the rocket came from, with some confusion over its identity.

It was thought to be a leftover piece of the rocket that launched the weather satellite. After careful analysis, various groups of space trackers confirmed that the rocket was leftover from the launch of China's Chang'e 5-T1 mission. A Chinese Long March 3C rocket was used to send a craft looping around the Moon in an attempt to see if China could bring a vehicle back to Earth. Astronomers are pretty sure that a chunk of the Long March 3C rocket has remained in an extremely long and straight path around Earth since the Chang'e 5-T1 mission.

China tried to deny that the rocket was part of the country's space program. Wang may have mixed up his Chinese missions. Chang e-5 was a completely different mission that was launched in 2020, while the Chang e 5-T1 mission took place six years earlier.

The Space Force's 18th Space Control Squadron, which keeps track of space debris around Earth, noted on its website that the rocket from the Chang'e rocket. The Long March 3C from the flight did not reenter our atmosphere and has been in space ever since, according to the 18SPCS.

Image: STR/AFP via Getty Images

It won't say for sure that the object is from the 5-T1 mission, though the 18SPCS update gives credibility to the idea.

The 18SPCS doesn't have good data because they don't really care about tracking deep-space debris. As the space environment has become more crowded, the 18SPCS is more focused on tracking space debris in close proximity to Earth. The population of objects has grown a lot over the last few decades, especially after Russia destroyed one of its own satellites during an anti-satellite test. The 18SPCS claimed that after the Chang 5-T1 rocket passed more than 22,000 miles beyond Earth, their official trackers stopped following it. The database will be revised to reflect more up-to-date information.

The 18SPCS can't confirm or deny the source of the space debris, but they are pretty sure that the rocket is from Chang'e 5-T1 and that it is now on the lunar surface. Bill Gray, an astronomer and asteroid tracker running Project Pluto, was the first to predict the demise of the rocket.

We have crashed a lot of objects on the lunar surface before, so the collision shouldn't be a cause for concern. In order to see what was underneath the lunar surface, NASA crashed a lunar probe into the moon in 2009, sending pieces of rockets from the Apollo missions to the lunar surface. All of the crashes that have happened in the past have been done to cause a lunar lander or vehicle bound for the Moon to go a little too hard. This may be the first time that a vehicle that wasn't supposed to go to the Moon made it there. It is the first time we have heard of it.

Gray and others have used this episode to argue that we need better plans for disposing of our deep-space debris and that we need to be tracking junk that goes to extra high altitudes. The rocket's leftovers could be great to study. If they can, the team behind NASA's lunar mission will try to see the aftermath of the crash. Gray predicted that the rocket would hit the Moon.

John Keller, the deputy project scientist for the lunar mission, told The Verge that they have an interest in finding the impact crater and will attempt to do so over the coming weeks and months. Positive identification is based on before and after images under the same lighting conditions, as the Moon is full of fresh impact craters.

Hopefully, the LRO team can find it and give us an image of the final resting place of the Long March 3C rocket, and perhaps we can use this whole experience as an opportunity to see what kinds of materials the collision was able to dig up.