SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is no stranger to global controversy. However, he’s been completely exonerated from the uproar that occurred in 2022 following a rocket’s impact on the far side of the Moon.
On March 4, 2022, an unidentified rocket crashed into the western edge of the Moon’s hidden face, creating a double crater about 95 feet wide upon impact. Initially, it was believed to be the second stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket that had launched the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) mission in 2015.
DSCOVR was SpaceX’s first interplanetary mission. It placed a weather observatory, operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, at the L1 Lagrange point, 930,000 miles from Earth.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s second stage had to reach a record altitude to successfully insert DSCOVR. As a result, it ran out of fuel to return to Earth’s atmosphere and lost the kinetic energy needed to escape the gravitational pull exerted by the Moon and Earth.
In the following years, the rocket followed an erratic trajectory, leading astronomers to predict its impending impact on the Moon. Controversy began in January 2022 when renowned scientists Bill Gray and Jonathan McDowell predicted that Falcon 9’s second stage would crash into the Moon on March 4. Gray is known for developing the Project Pluto software for tracking near-Earth objects, while McDowell is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center.
While their calculations were correct, and a rocket did indeed impact the far side of the Moon on that date, the object they were tracking had been misidentified. It wasn’t a Falcon 9 but rather a Chinese rocket stage.
A Crater Created by China, Not SpaceX
In February 2022, just a month before the impact, Jon Giorgini from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory notified Gray that the object they were tracking wasn’t related to the DSCOVR mission rocket. NASA had already identified SpaceX’s Falcon 9, confirming it wasn’t on a trajectory near the Moon. So, what was this mysterious object?
Gray assumed it was of artificial origin (as it was orbiting Earth rather than the Sun) and examined launches before March 2015 to find a match. He discovered one that fit: the Chinese Chang’e 5-T1 mission.
Chang’e 5-T1 was launched on Oct. 23, 2014, to test a reentry capsule. It served as a precursor to the successful 2020 Chang’e 5 mission, which returned China’s first lunar soil samples to Earth.
The object that impacted the far side of the Moon on March 4 was likely 2014-065B, the third stage of a Chinese Long March 3 rocket that had deployed the Chang’e 5-T1 mission capsule seven years earlier.
How could they be certain this time? McDowell compared the orbital elements with those of a CubeSat that had followed the same trajectory, and the match was very close. However, the rocket’s upper stages can alter their orbits and behave unpredictably when they contain fuel debris. As such, there was still some uncertainty.
That changed in late 2023 when the Planetary Science Journal published a study led by the University of Arizona that confirmed the object’s origin. Researchers analyzed its composition and trajectory and determined that it resembled a Chinese rocket more than a Falcon 9.
By studying how light reflected off the object’s surface as it traveled through space, scientists established that it was a rocket stage from the Chang’e 5-T1 mission rather than Falcon 9’s second stage. This finding contradicted the Chinese space agency’s claim that its launcher had burned up in Earth’s atmosphere years earlier.
According to the study, the object resembled a dumbbell, consisting of two large masses at each end. This resulted in a double-impact crater. One mass contained two 1,200-pound engines without fuel. Meanwhile, the other contained the support structure or some additional instrument that provided stability to the rocket. This was the first time astronomers had observed a double crater.
Despite the controversy, this was neither the first nor the last time a human spacecraft crashed on the Moon. If the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft survived its impact in 2019, tardigrades might live on the Moon. Ten years earlier, NASA intentionally crashed a rocket into the Moon to study the material ejected by the explosion. Unlike the Israeli incident, NASA was transparent about its actions and didn’t attempt to conceal them from the public.
Image | SpaceX | NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
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