Rocket moon crash LIVE – Space junk ‘HITS moon’ at 5,800mph & China denies responsibility after SpaceX blamed in ‘error’

Who is Elon Musk?

Born June 28, 1971, Elon Musk is a business mogul and entrepreneur.

He is the co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI, as well as the founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer of SpaceX.

Musk is also an early-stage investor, CEO, and Product Architect of Tesla, Inc., and the creator of The Boring Company.

He is the world’s wealthiest individual, according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the Forbes real-time billionaires list, with an estimated net worth of roughly $224billion as of February 2022.

How far away is the Moon?

The average distance between Earth and the Moon is about 238,855 miles miles (384,400 kilometers), according to NASA.

That means it is about 30 Earths away.

Biocontamination possible

There is a possibility of biocontamination at the crash site, according to David Rothery, a professor of planetary geosciences at The Open University in the United Kingdom.

This is because rocket parts aren’t sterile when launched.

“Most microbes will have died but maybe not all. They’re probably not going to reproduce but it’s a very small risk,” he told CNN.

Crater won’t be the first on the Moon

If the rocket booster creates a crater on the Moon from the impact, it won’t be the only crater on the Moon, CNN noted.

The Moon has no protective atmosphere, so impact craters occur naturally when it’s hit by objects like asteroids regularly.

NASA prepared for ‘unique event’

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter monitored the moon’s exosphere for any changes as a result of the impact of the rocket booster to the moon, Space.com reported.

LRO “will not be in a position to observe the impact as it happens. However, the mission team is assessing if observations can be made to any changes to the lunar environment associated with the impact and later identify the crater formed by the impact,” NASA officials said in a statement given to Inside Outer Space and cited by Space.com

“This unique event presents an exciting research opportunity,” the officials added.

“Following the impact, the mission can use its cameras to identify the impact site, comparing older images to images taken after the impact. The search for the impact crater will be challenging and might take weeks to months.”

European Space Agency commented

The European Space Agency commented on the upcoming collision of the rocket booster and the Moon’s surface.

“This still-evolving finding underscores the need for enhanced space tracking, and greater data sharing between spacecraft operators, launch providers, and the astronomy and space surveillance communities,” the agency wrote.

Did SpaceX respond?

The SpaceX Twitter account doesn’t show any sort of recent response to the accusations that the rocket booster belonged to the company.

In fact, the rocket part most likely belonged to China, not Elon Musk’s company.

China has since denied the accusation.

Has space junk hit the Moon before?

As part of its LCROSS mission, in 2009 Nasa deliberately smashed a rocket booster into the Moon in hopes of learning something from the debris it left behind.

“In essence, this is a ‘free’ LCROSS… except we probably won’t see the impact,” Bill Gray, who writes the popular Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, wrote in January.

Impact was not be visible

The rocket part was expected to hit the Moon on March 4, where it left a crater about 65 feet in diameter on the surface but unfortunately, it was not possible to see the impact live as the tumbling rocket part is expected to hit the Moon’s far side – the part that faces away from Earth.

Instead, astronomers relied on images taken by satellites including Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to view what happens after the collision.

Gray advocated for ‘simple steps’

What the confusion over the wayward rocket part shows is that there should be better tracking of deep space junk, Bill Gray, who writes the Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, argued.

“Many more spacecraft are now going into high orbits, and some of them will be taking crews to the Moon,” Gray said.

“Such junk will no longer be merely an annoyance to a small group of astronomers.”

“A few fairly simple steps would help quite a bit.”

Did the rocket belong to China?

Last week, China said that the rocket part is NOT theirs.

Bill Gray, who writes the popular Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, however, still thinks it’s an old rocket part from a lunar mission dating back to 2014.

His claims have been backed up by Nasa and other experts.

They believe it’s from China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission, which was used to test technology for bringing samples back from the Moon.

China’s initial denial

“According to China’s monitoring, the upper stage of the Chang’e-5 mission rocket has fallen through the Earth’s atmosphere in a safe manner and burnt up completely,” Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said of the mystery object on course to hit the Moon.

However, experts noticed that China referred to the Chang’e-5 mission, not the similarly named Chang’e 5-T1 mission at the heart of it.

Who predicted the collision, continued

“Back in 2015, I (mis)identified this object as 2015-007B, the second stage of the DSCOVR spacecraft,” Gray wrote on February 12.

“We now have good evidence that it is actually 2014-065B, the booster for the Chang’e 5-T1 lunar mission.”

Who predicted the collision?

In January, space trackers calculated that a piece of manmade debris was on course to hit the Moon and it was first spotted by Bill Gray, who writes the popular Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects.

He reported that the junk was a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage launched from Florida in February 2015.

It was on a mission to deploy an Earth observation satellite called DSCOVR for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

However, Gray later retracted his claim and said the rocket part most likely belonged to China, and China has since denied the accusation.

‘Intrinsic uncertainty’

Professor Jonathan McDowell from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told BBC News he agrees with Gray’s re-assessment that the rocket part most likely belonged to China instead.

He said there is lots of “intrinsic uncertainty” in identifying space debris and errors in identification can occur.

“We rely on a small handful of volunteers who do it on their own time,” he explained to the BBC.

“So there is limited scope for cross-checking.”

What is the rocket booster?

The object is probably part of a rocket that launched a small Chinese spacecraft, called Chang’e 5-T1, towards the Moon in 2014.

Bill Gray, who writes the popular Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, originally reported that the junk was a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage launched from Florida in February 2015.

However, Bill later retracted his claim and said the rocket part most likely belonged to China instead.

China has since denied the accusation.

How much space junk is there?

According to the European Space Agency, there are currently 36,500 bits of space trash larger than 10cm in orbit.

Deep space trash is not formally tracked by any space program or institution.

Monitoring space is costly, and the hazards of high-altitude debris to people are minimal.

What is space junk?

Space junk is hardware abandoned from missions or satellites that do not have enough fuel or energy to return to Earth.

When was the rocket first seen?

In March 2015, the rocket section was first seen from Earth.

It was discovered by a Nasa-funded space scan in Arizona, but the team immediately lost interest when it was discovered that the object was not an asteroid.

How much did the rocket weigh?

The rocket weighed three tonnes and had been traced for years.

China continues to deny involvement

China disputes that the moon-bound stage came from their nation, a claim that was first supported by data from the US Space Force, which indicated that the object had reentered Earth’s atmosphere in 2015.

But, according to SpaceNews, Space Force personnel just acknowledged that the Chang’e 5-T1 stage did not deorbit back then; the purported reentry was an extrapolation, not genuine tracking data, as Bill Gray had stated.

Rocket origin still unknown

The origins of the errant rocket stage are a point of contention.

Initially, the source was suspected to be a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, but additional investigations revealed it to be a Chinese launcher.

China, on the other hand, has contested this result, demonstrating how difficult it is to follow small objects distant from Earth.

First unintentional crash

Without including the probes that have crashed while attempting to land on the moon, this was the first known inadvertent lunar collision involving a piece of space gear.

What time did the rocket hit?

Experts claim the incident occurred at 7.25am EST on the lunar far side, out of reach of ground-based observatories.

Where did the rocket hit?

The collision likely occurred on the far side of the Moon on Friday.

The one-tonne hunk of space junk was previously traveling at around 2.6 km per second.