A piece of debris from SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that has been drifting in space for the last seven years would crash into the Moon in March, predict astronomers
The booster, abandoned after completing its mission, during its ‘chaotic’ path had a close fly-by of the Moon in January.
Astronomer Bill Gray's projectpluto.com reported the upcoming fall and its impact in a blog post.
Gray, who calculated the space junk's new collision course with the Moon, told AFP that the second stage of the rocket has been floating in what mathematicians call a chaotic orbit.
"I've been tracking junk of this sort for about 15 years. And this is the first unintentional lunar impact that we've had," Gray told AFP.
Gray uses a software called Project Pluto for calculating the trajectory of asteroids and other objects in space and is used in NASA-financed space observation programs.
Gray calculates that the rocket would crash into the Moon's dark side on March 4 at more than 9,000 kilometers per hour.
Though the exact time and cash site may vary slightly there is agreement that the collision on the Moon would happen on the same day.
Since the moon doesn't have an atmosphere of its own to burn up a free falling object, astronomers think that there would be an impact that could create a crator.
Allaying the fears, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, said in his tweet that the old Falcon 9 second stage hitting the moon on 4 March "is interesting, but not a big deal."
Elon Musk's SpaceX company designed Falcon 9 as a reusable, two-stage rocket. This lost booster was launched from Florida in 2015 for the purpose of putting into orbit a NASA satellite called the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR). However, it lost too much fuel after the mission and lost its way.
“So it has been following a somewhat chaotic orbit since February 2015,” said meteorologist Eric Berger explained in a recent post published by Ars Technica.
