Elon Musk’s space exploration company has launched a rocket that is on track to collide with the Moon and detonate.
The Falcon 9 booster was launched in 2015, however, it did not have enough fuel to return to Earth after completing its mission, thus it remained in space.
It will be the first known uncontrolled rocket crash with the Moon, according to astronomer Jonathan McDowell told in media talk. However, he claims that the consequences will be small.
It was part of Elon Musk’s space exploration programme, a commercial firm whose ultimate goal is to get humans to live on other planets.
According to Prof McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States, the rocket has been dragged by varying gravitational forces of the Earth, Moon, and Sun since 2015, making its route somewhat “chaotic.”
After completing a mission to deploy a space weather satellite on a million-mile voyage, the rocket was abandoned in high orbit seven years ago.
“It’s been dead for a long time, merely obeying the laws of gravity.”
It has joined the millions of other bits of space junk – machinery left in orbit after missions were completed with insufficient energy to return to Earth.
“Over the decades there have been maybe 50 large objects that we’ve totally lost track of. This may have happened a bunch of times before, we just didn’t notice. This would be the first confirmed case,” Prof McDowell says.
Journalist Eric Berger of the space website Ars Technica and data analyst Bill Gray of his blog both predicted the Falcon 9’s disaster.
The collision is scheduled for March 4th, with the rocket exploding as it makes contact.
“It’s essentially a four-tonne metal tank with a rocket engine mounted on top. So, if you imagine hurling that at a rock at 5,000 miles per hour, it won’t be happy “According to Professor McDowell.
On the Moon’s surface, it will produce a small artificial crater.
According to Bill Gray, who utilizes software to track near-Earth space objects, it flew close to Earth on January 5th. According to him, it will most likely hit the Moon’s far side on March 4th.
Prof. McDowell and other astronomers conducted an experiment in 2009, crashing a similar-sized rocket into the Moon. Sensors collected evidence of the collision so that the crater could be studied.
Prof McDowell says why this means scientists are unlikely to learn anything new from the incident.
He goes on to say that while there are no immediate implications to space junk permitted to drift and collide, there may be in the future.
“We’d like to know what’s out there if there are cities and bases on the Moon in the future. It’s much easier to become organised when there’s slow traffic in the place than it is when there’s a problem.”
What will happen between now and the 4th of March? The rocket, on the other hand, will continue to follow the rules of gravity as it travels through space before colliding with the Moon.
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