AT OVER 9,000 KILOMETRES PER HOUR, THREE TONS OF SPACE DEBRIS WILL CRASH INTO THE MOON

 

The Moon is going to be slammed by 3 tonnes of space trash, a punch that will carve out a crater large enough to hold several semitrailers. On Friday, the leftover rocket will slam into the far side of the Moon at 9,300 kph, far from the prying eyes of telescopes. It could take weeks, if not months, for satellite photographs to confirm the impact. Experts believe it has been tumbling aimlessly through space since China launched it nearly a decade ago. Officials in China, though, remain sceptical that it is theirs. Scientists expect the item, whoever it is, to tear a hole 10 to 20 metres across and scatter Moon dust hundreds of kilometres across the desolate, pockmarked surface. Tracking low-orbiting space debris is relatively simple. Objects that shoot further into space are unlikely to collide with anything, and these far-flung bits are quickly forgotten, save for a few spectators who love playing celestial detective on the side.

After asteroid tracker Bill Gray spotted the collision trajectory in January, SpaceX was first blamed for the forthcoming lunar litter. A month later, he clarified that the "mystery" item was not a SpaceX Falcon rocket upper stage from NASA's deep space climate observatory launch in 2015. Gray believes it was the third stage of a Chinese rocket that orbited the Moon in 2014 and returned with a test sample capsule. The upper stage, however, had reentered Earth's atmosphere and burned up, according to Chinese ministry officials. However, there were two Chinese missions with identical names — the test flight and the lunar sample return mission in 2020 — and analysts in the United States believe the two are being confused.

The United States Space Command, which monitors lower-level space debris, confirmed Tuesday that the Chinese top stage from the 2014 lunar mission never deorbited, contrary to what its database previously suggested. However, it was unable to determine the country of origin of the object that was due to collide with the Moon. In a statement, a spokeswoman said, "We focus on objects closer to the Earth." Gray, a physicist and mathematician, said he's now certain it's China's rocket. "I've gotten a little more wary of such things," he explained. "But there's no way it could be anything else," she says.

Gray's new assessment is supported by Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, although he adds: "The result will be identical. On the Moon, it will create yet another little crater." The Moon already has a plethora of craters, some measuring up to 1,600 miles in diameter (2,500 kilometers). The Moon is helpless against the constant assault of meteors and asteroids, as well as the occasional arriving spaceship, including a couple that are purposely wrecked for science's benefit. Because there is no erosion when there is no weather, impact craters stay indefinitely.