Remains from the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that left in high orbit in 2015 will hit the moon on March 2022. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is now roughly a 4-ton piece of lost space trash that will hit the moon at 5,000 miles per hour.
Bill Gray was the first person to notice the upper stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket. Gray is an amateur astronomer and software developer in Maine. Grays used his special software to pick up the impact in an orbital model and worked alongside other observatories around the world to gather additional data.
“With all the data, we’ve got a certain impact at March 4, 2022, 12:25:58 Universal Time (4:25 a.m. PT),” Gray explains in a blog post. The prediction was later confirmed by Jonathan Mcdowell, who is a lead watcher of orbit and everything near Earth in space.
Gray said that he expects the rocket to hit the lunar surface in a crater named Hertzsprung which is a little bigger than the state of Iowa. Thankfully the location where the rocket will hit doesn’t pose any threat to the Apollo mission or other space program landing sites.
“So I’m not bothered by one more crater being made on the moon,” David Rothery, professor of planetary geosciences at the UK’s Open University, wrote in The Conversation.
“It already has something like half a billion craters that are 10 meters or more in diameter. What we should worry about is contaminating the moon with living microbes, or molecules that could in the future be mistaken as evidence of former life on the moon.”
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request comment.
