[imagesource: Twitter / Elon Musk]
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has already made history on multiple occasions and it’s set to do so once more.
Except, this time, it won’t be on purpose.
Back in 2015, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket into space, but it left its second stage behind, which is now on a collision course with the Moon.
The unruly second stage has been following a rather chaotic orbit for nearly seven years.
The thing is, it soared so high that it didn’t have enough fuel to return to Earth’s atmosphere, or the energy to escape the gravity of the Earth-Moon system.
So, hitting the moon will be the next best thing that it can do at this stage, even though that doesn’t sound great.
The event will mark “the first unintended lunar impact we’ve had, period,” noted Bill Gray, the guy who writes the widely used Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects.
Inverse reported that some reckon that this event could have an unintended benefit for the progression of science and scientific knowledge of the moon.
NASA has been involved in something similar before, launching the upper stage of a rocket toward a collision with the Moon to understand its composition:
NASA has purposefully used one of its missions to hit the Moon and observe the revealed material. The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, launched in 2009, struck the Moon in two locations. One was the satellite itself and the other was a rocket stage.
Both hit the Moon’s Cabeus crater on October 9 of that year. Both LCROSS and a companion satellite launched simultaneously, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, were able to analyze the material moved by the impact.
The data showed a wealth of materials within the crater. Perhaps most strikingly, it confirmed the presence of water in the Cabeus crater. That discovery was perhaps most critical to the likes of SpaceX, who have expressed interest in building a permanent settlement on the Moon.
Gray predicts that the second stage will hit the moon on March 4, at a speed of around 2,58 kilometres per second, or around 9 300 kilometres per hour.
Although, he notes that the two orbiters observing the Moon (NASA’s LRO and India’s Chandrayaan-2) might not be in the right place to observe the impact when it happens.
If they pass over afterwards, they will still be able to observe the new crater, and that might add some value to understanding more about the Moon’s physical properties.
Space junk floating around and striking the Moon isn’t great but hey, at least it will provide some scientific worth.
[source:inverse]
