Thu, Mar 03, 2022 page7

• Space junk on 9,300kph collision course with moon

  • AP, CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida
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  The moon is about to get walloped by 3 tonnes of space junk, a punch that is to carve out a crater that could fit several semi-tractor trailers.

  The leftover rocket is to smash into the far side of the moon at 9,300kph tomorrow, away from telescopes’ prying eyes. It might take weeks, even months, to confirm the impact through satellite images.

  It has been tumbling haphazardly through space, experts believe, since China launched it nearly a decade ago.

  However, Chinese officials are dubious it is theirs.

  No matter whose it is, scientists expect the object to carve out a hole 10m to 20m across and send moon dust flying hundreds of kilometers across the barren, pockmarked surface.

  Low-orbiting space junk is relatively easy to track. Objects launching deeper into space are unlikely to hit anything and these far-flung pieces are usually soon forgotten, except by a handful of observers who enjoy playing celestial detective on the side.

  SpaceX originally took the rap for the upcoming lunar litter after asteroid tracker Bill Gray identified the collision course in January.

  He corrected himself a month later, saying the “mystery” object was not a SpaceX Falcon rocket upper stage from the 2015 launch of a deep-space climate observatory for NASA.

  Gray said it was likely the third stage of a Chinese rocket that sent a test sample capsule to the moon and back in 2014.

  However, Chinese officials said the upper stage had re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and burned up.

  However, there were two Chinese missions with similar designations — the test flight and 2020’s lunar sample return mission — and US observers believe the two are getting mixed up.

  The US Space Command, which tracks lower space junk, on Tuesday confirmed that the Chinese upper stage from the 2014 lunar mission never deorbited, as previously indicated in its database.

  However, it could not confirm the country of origin for the object about to strike the moon.

  “We focus on objects closer to the Earth,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

  Gray, a mathematician and physicist, said he is confident now that it is China’s rocket.

  “I’ve become a little bit more cautious of such matters,” he said. “But I really just don’t see any way it could be anything else.”

  Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics supported Gray’s revised assessment, but added: “The effect will be the same. It’ll leave yet another small crater on the moon.”

  The moon already bears countless craters, ranging up to 2,500km. With little to no real atmosphere, the moon is defenseless against the constant barrage of meteors and asteroids, and the occasional incoming spacecraft, including a few intentionally crashed for science’s sake. With no weather, there is no erosion and so impact craters last forever.

  China has a lunar lander on the moon’s far side, but it would be too far away to detect Friday’s impact just north of the equator. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter would also be out of range. It is unlikely India’s moon-orbiting Chandrayaan-2 will be passing by then, either.

  “I had been hoping for something [significant] to hit the moon for a long time. Ideally, it would have hit on the near side of the moon at some point where we could actually see it,” Gray said.

  After initially pinning the upcoming strike on Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Gray took another look after an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) questioned his claim.

  Now, he is “pretty thoroughly persuaded” that it is a Chinese rocket part, based not only on orbital tracking back to its 2014 liftoff, but also data received from its short-lived ham radio experiment.

  JPL’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies has endorsed Gray’s reassessment.

  A University of Arizona team also recently identified the Chinese Long March rocket segment from the light reflected off its paint, during telescope observations of the careening cylinder.

  It is about 12m long and 3m in diameter.
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