Rogue rocket body imaged weeks before its moon impact (photo)

A Virtual Telescope Project image shows a rogue rocket stage on the road to oblivion, almost a month before it smashed into the moon.

The image was visible in the Planewave telescope near Rome during the last close flyby of Earth. The Virtual Telescope Project founder said in an image caption that the rocket was 2,500 miles from Earth.

The stage was in the last weeks before it crashed into the moon. The impact happened on Friday. It was out of view of ground-based telescopes on the lunar far side.

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Several other experts have reached the same conclusion that Masi did, that the moon impactor is a part of the Long March 3C rocket. The technology demonstrator of the Chang'e 5 mission was Chang'e 5-T1 and it brought a sample of the moon back to Earth in December 2020.

Bill Gray was the first astronomer to predict the moon impact. The impactor was thought to be the upper stage of the rocket that launched the Deep Space Climate Observatory.

Gray revised his analysis. The object was thought to be a piece of the Change 5-T1 launcher. Chinese space officials disagreed with the finding.

The officials with the U.S. Space Force seemed to agree with China's claim that the Chang'e 5-T1 stage burned up in the atmosphere in 2015. The rocket body was presumed to have reentered after all, but the Space Force recently told SpaceNews that it was an extrapolation, not an observation.

The origin story is still being disputed, but what is well-established is that the LRO is going to look for the crater. It will likely take weeks or months. It will take some time to analyze the probe's images because LRO was out of range of the initial impact.

It was the first known lunar collision involving a piece of space hardware. This doesn't include the various spaceships that crashed during lunar landing attempts or the rocket bodies that were deliberately crashed, such as the third stages of moon rockets that NASA steered into the lunar surface on multiple Apollo missions.

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