He said further observations would be needed in early February to refine the prediction and bring the uncertainty down.ĭetermining the impact location as precisely as possible will enable NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and India's Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft to find the impact crater, and perhaps even image the impact "if we're lucky," although it is very likely to go unobserved. Nevertheless, Gray estimated that his prediction would only be wrong by a degree of two minutes or so. These "unpredictable effects" are very small, but they will accumulate between now and March 4. It doesn't just push outward some of it bounces 'sideways.' The object is a long cylinder, spinning slowly you can see the light from it vary as it tumbles, and you can plot a light curve for it indicating that it rotates about once every 180.7 seconds." "However, the actual effects of that sunlight are hard to predict perfectly. This usually enables me to make predictions with a good bit of confidence. I have a rough idea of how much sunlight is pushing outward on the object, gently pushing it away from the sun. "I have a fairly complete mathematical model of what the earth, moon, sun, and planets are doing and how their gravity is affecting the object. "Space junk can be a little tricky," he wrote in the blog post. Some uncertainties remain in the predictions for exactly when and where the object will strike the moon, according to Gray. It's interesting, but not a big deal.- Jonathan McDowell January 25, 2022 It's interesting, but not a big deal," McDowell said in a tweet Tuesday.įor those asking: yes, an old Falcon 9 second stage left in high orbit in 2015 is going to hit the moon on March 4. "For those asking: yes, an old Falcon 9 second stage left in high orbit in 2015 is going to hit the moon on March 4. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also agreed with Gray's conclusion. Now, experts who track near-Earth objects say the rocket stage is on a collision course with the moon.īill Gray-a creator of software that tracks near-Earth objects-has predicted in a blog post that the rocket stage will very likely strike the far side of the moon near its equator on March 4, 2022. This left the second stage segment in a somewhat chaotic orbit. Watch NASA's Asteroid-Deflecting DART Spacecraft Speeding Through Spaceīut after sending the satellite on its way, the second stage of the rocket lacked the energy to escape the gravity of the Earth-moon system and was high enough that it did not have sufficient fuel to be directed back into Earth's atmosphere, space expert and meteorologist Eric Berger wrote for Ars Technica.Creating a Magnetic Field Around Mars Could Help Us Colonize It.
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