3-ton rocket debris will create a large crater on the Moon

The crater created by the rocket debris that will hit the Moon on March 4 is large enough to fit several trucks.

Large rocket debris will crash into the dark side of the Moon at 9,300km/h, far away from telescopes. Space agencies can take weeks, even months, to confirm the impact via satellite imagery. Experts say the object has been floating in space since China launched a rocket nearly a decade ago. But Chinese authorities denied this information. Scientists predict that the rocket debris will create an impact crater 10 to 20 meters in diameter, sending lunar dust away for kilometers across the empty surface of many craters.

Rocket debris will crash into the dark side of the Moon.

Space junk flying in low orbit is relatively easy to track. Objects launched into deeper space are less likely to crash into any celestial bodies. Asteroid tracking expert Bill Gray first identified the debris from a SpaceX rocket in January. He corrected the information a month later and confirmed the mysterious object was not the upper stage of the Falcon rocket. 9 put NASA's deep space climate observatory into orbit in 2015.

According to Gray, it is likely that this is the third stage of the Chinese rocket that sent the test sample chamber to the Moon and back to Earth in 2014. However, Chinese authorities said this stage. fell back into Earth's atmosphere and caught fire. The US Space Command's database also shows that the Chinese rocket stage from the 2014 mission never fell out of orbit, but the agency was unable to determine from which country the object that was about to hit the Moon came from. . Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also supports Gray's new conclusion.

The moon has countless craters of various sizes. Due to its lack of atmosphere, the Moon is almost impossible to stop the approaching meteors and asteroids, sometimes even some spacecraft crashing. With no atmosphere, the impact crater does not erode and is permanent. China has a rover in the dark side of the Moon, but the vehicle was too far away to detect the collision that took place north of the equator on March 4. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance orbiter is also out of view. The Indian ship Chandrayaan-2 is also unlikely to fly over there.