A five-ton mystery rocket was set to crash into the moon at 6,000 mph Friday, and NASA will promptly move its orbiting camera into position to study the fallout.
The projectile is a spent rocket booster believed to be either from a SpaceX rocket launched in 2015 or a Chinese rocket launched a year earlier, though both parties deny ownership. Those rockets were discarded into space after launching satellites. The one on a collision course with the moon is an upper-stage booster that is 40 feet long and weighs 10,000 pounds.
Today, 4 March at 13:25 CET, a rocket upper stage weighing ~4 tonnes will hit the far side of the Moon🌑 at a speed of 9300 km/h. This is the 1st time a piece of terrestrial technology will unintentionally collide with another celestial body in the #SolarSystem.
📷: NASA/GSFC/ASU pic.twitter.com/Kw7qFEhbiE— DLR – English (@DLR_en) March 4, 2022
The expected point of impact is the barren plain within the massive Hertzsprung crater on the far side of the moon from Earth. According to sciencealert.com, the collision will send a shock wave through the rocket, which will then disintegrate in a chorus of explosions. Another shock wave will move downward from the rocket into the “regolith,” which is the moon’s powdery upper layer, generating a white-hot flash visible from outer space. A plume of vaporized rock and rocket fragments will rise before raining down on the lunar surface.
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Earthlings won’t get to watch the collision in real time because it is on the other side of the moon. But in the coming weeks, NASA’s orbiter will begin to survey the scene and transmit photos back to scientists.
NASA’s last chance to study a major moon strike came in 2009 when it crashed a satellite into the surface, creating a crater near the moon’s south pole.
