The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), NASA’s eye in the sky orbiting the Moon, has found the site of the crashing mystery rocket crash that crashed on the other side of the Moon on March 4, 2022.
Images from the LRO, taken on May 25, revealed not just a single crater, but a double crater formed by the impact of the rocket, which poses a new mystery for astronomers.
Why a double crater? While they are a bit unusual: none of the Apollo S-IVBs that hit the Moon created double craters, they are not impossible to create, especially if an object hits at a low angle. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Astronomer Bill Gray, who discovered the object and predicted its lunar disappearance in January, explains that the reinforcement “reached about 15 degrees from the vertical. So that’s not the explanation for it.”
The impact site consists of an 18-meter-wide eastern crater superimposed on a 16-meter-wide western crater. Mark Robinson, principal investigator of the LRO camera team, proposes that this double-crater formation could result from an object with different, large masses at each end.
Image before (28-02-2022) and after (21-05-2022) of the Moon. (NASA / GSFC / Arizona State University)
“Typically, a spent rocket has too much concentrated at the end of the engine; the rest of the rocket stage consists mainly of an empty fuel tank. As the origin of the rocket’s body remains uncertain, the dual nature of the rocket Crater can help indicate your identity, “he said.
So what is it?
It’s a long story. The unidentified rocket first caught the attention of astronomers earlier this year when it was identified as a higher stage of SpaceX, which had launched NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) at the Lagrange Sun-Earth L1 point in 2015.
Gray, who designs software that tracks space debris, was alerted to the object when his software made a mistake. He told the Washington Post on Jan. 26 that “my software complained that it couldn’t project its orbit beyond March 4, and it couldn’t because the rocket had hit the moon.”
Gray spread the word and the story turned around in late January, but a few weeks later, he received an email from Jon Giorgini at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL).
Giorgini noted that DSCOVR’s trajectory should not have brought the reinforcement close to the Moon. In an effort to reconcile conflicting trajectories, Gray began investigating his data, where he discovered that he had misidentified the DSCOVR reinforcement in 2015.
SpaceX was not the culprit after all. But there was definitely still an object rushing towards the Moon. So what was it?
A bit of detective work led Gray to determine that it was actually the top stage of China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission, a 2014 technology demonstration mission that laid the groundwork for Chang’e 5. , which successfully returned a lunar sample to Earth in 2020. (By the way, China recently announced that it would follow this sample return mission with a more ambitious Mars sample return project later this decade) .
Jonathan McDowell offered some corroborating evidence that seemed to reinforce this new theory of object identity.
The mystery was solved.
Unless, days later, China’s foreign minister claimed it was not his impeller: he had desorbed and crashed into the ocean shortly after launch.
As it stands now, Gray remains convinced that it was the Change 5-T1 engine that hit the Moon, proposing that the Foreign Minister made an honest mistake, confusing Chang’e 5-T1 with Chang’e 5 of similar name (whose reinforcement he did in fact sinks into the ocean).
As for the new double crater on the Moon, the fact that the LRO team was able to find the impact site so quickly is an impressive feat in itself. It was discovered a few months after the impact, with some help from Gray and JPL, who independently reduced the search area to a few tens of miles.
For comparison, the impact site of the Apollo 16 S-IVB took more than six years of careful research to find.
Bill Gray’s account of the reinforcement identification saga is here, as is his vision of the impact of the double crater. LRO images can be found here.
This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.