An Elon Musk's SpaceX rocket is on a collision course with the moon. According to Bill Gray, creator of Project Pluto, a website that tracks near-Earth objects. The rocket is expected to land near the lunar equator sometime on March 4.
Although the rocket crash is "no big deal" according to astronomers and doesn't pose much of a threat to life. However, it will mark the first time that "space junk" from the United States has collided with the lunar surface.
“For those asking: yes, an old Falcon 9 second stage left in high orbit in 2015 will hit the moon on March 4th. But it's not a big deal." Tweeted the Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell on Wednesday, adding that "things left in cislunar orbit [orbits between Earth and the Moon] are unstable — they will eventually hit the Moon or Earth or be disturbed in solar orbit." The rocket stopped in space for the first time in 2015 from Cape Canaveral and was part of a mission that took satellites into space.
The unintentional crash of the SpaceX Rocket
“This is the first unintentional case that I am aware of. I track about a dozen objects in "high" orbits close to the moon. Mainly so people looking for asteroids know where they are (and can ignore them; they're looking for rocks, not junk.) In theory, given enough time, these objects will either hit the Earth or the Moon, or gain energy by passing through the Moon. and will be ejected into orbit around the Sun.”
He added: "In each case, I'm rooting for a lunar impact. We already know what happens when garbage hits Earth; There's not much to learn from this (although the junk hitting Earth might be of some scientific interest.) In 2009, a rocket was deliberately impacted on the moon in hopes of learning something from the ejected material. In essence, this is a "free" LCROSS... except we probably won't see the impact (it's on the far side of the moon) and it's not in a particularly interesting area; LCROSS was aimed at the south pole, where ice can remain in shadowy craters.” As the event is largely taking place on the dark side of the moon, it will not be observable from Earth.
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