Washington: A piece of the Spacex rocket launched seven years ago and left in space after completing his mission will hit the month in March, experts say.
The rocket was deployed in 2015 to be included in the NASA satellite orbit called the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR).
Since then, the second stage of rockets, or booster, has floated in what mathematicians call chaotic orbits, astronomers Bill Gray told AFP on Wednesday.
It was gray calculated collided with a new garbage room with the moon.
The booster passed quite close to the moon in January in a meeting that changed the orbit, said Gray.
He was behind the Pluto project, the software that allowed to calculate the asteroid trajectory and other objects in space and used in the NASA observation room program funded.
A week after the rocket stage shot close to the moon, Gray was observed again and concluded it would hit the dark side of the month on March 4 at more than 5,500 miles per hour (9,000 kilometers per hour).
Gray appealed to the amateur community of astronomers to join him in observing booster, and the conclusion was confirmed.
The right time and the impact place can change slightly from estimates, but there is a broad agreement that there will be a collision on that day.
“I’m this kind of garbage tracking for about 15 years.
And this is the first unintentional impact of the lunar we have,” said Gray AFP.
– Time to start regulating – Jonathan McDowell astronomers told AFP the same impact may occur without realizing it.
“There have been at least 50 objects left in earth orbit far in the 60s, 70s and 80s’ who had just been left there.
We did not track them,” he said.
“Now we take some of them …
but many of them we don’t find and so they don’t exist anymore,” he added.
“Maybe at least some of them hit the month deliberately and we just didn’t see.” The impact of spacex rocket pieces weighing four tons on the moon will not be seen from the earth in real time.
But it will leave the crater that scientists will be able to observe with spacecraft and satellites such as NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or India Chandrayaan-2, and thus learn more about the moon geology.
The spacecraft had accidentally hit the month before for scientific purposes, as during the Apollo mission to the seismometer test.
In 2009, NASA sent a rocket stage to throw to the moon near the south pole to find water.
But most rockets don’t go so far from Earth.
Spacex brought rocket booster that returned through the earth’s atmosphere so they were destroyed on the ocean.
The first stage is recovering and reused.
Gray said there might be more accidental crashes to the moon in the time as a Chinese space program, especially more trash leave in US orbits and.
Together with the US with international partners already planning a spacecraft orbiting moon.
McDowell recorded this event “began to be problematic when there was more traffic.” “This is actually a job no one to track garbage that we leave in the earth’s orbit in,” he added.
“I think now is the time to start arranging it.” SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comments from AFP.
The Elon Musk company is currently developing a moon lander that must allow NASA to send astronauts back to the moon in 2025 at the beginning.