"We know the mass of an empty Falcon 9 booster and that it will hit at 2.58 km/s the known momentum and energy of the object making the crater ought to help in calibrating the crater size vs. But its impact could still yield interesting insights about lunar geology. The Falcon 9 stage is headed for a relatively boring (by comparison) part of the moon, Gray wrote. The resulting impact blasted out significant amounts of water ice, suggesting that this resource is plentiful in the moon's polar regions. And in 2009, the agency intentionally crashed the upper stage of the Atlas V rocket that launched LRO into a crater at the moon's south pole. NASA steered the upper stages of multiple Saturn V rockets into the moon during the Apollo program, for instance. The Falcon 9 upper stage won't be the first rocket body to hit the moon, either. Twin moon probes crash into lunar mountain NASA slammed a rocket body into the moon for science Moon facts: Fun information about the Earth's moon Related: The greatest moon crashes of all time In 2019, for example, Israel's Beresheet probe and the Chandrayaan 2 lander both crashed during their lunar touchdown attempts. Indeed, many spacecraft have slammed into the moon unintentionally over the years. Insprucker, who hosts many of SpaceX's launch webcasts, clarified in a subsequent tweet that the upcoming impact will be the first lunar RUD for the company, not the first one overall. The upcoming impact will be the "first example of a Regolith Unplanned Disassembly if orbital dynamics holds true," SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker tweeted on Monday (opens in new tab), invoking the RUD acronym that Musk often uses to describe the destruction - or "rapid unplanned disassembly" - of a rocket during testing here on Earth. ("Cislunar" refers to the region between the Earth and moon.) Objects "left in cislunar orbit are unstable - will eventually either hit the moon or the Earth or get perturbed to solar orbit," he added in another tweet (opens in new tab). It's interesting, but not a big deal," astronomer and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote via Twitter (opens in new tab) on Tuesday (Jan. "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. Gray's calculations have been confirmed by others in the know. But nailing down its time and location is still important, potentially allowing moon-orbiting spacecraft such as NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and India's Chandrayaan 2 to study the resulting crater - "and, if we're lucky, maybe image the impact," Gray wrote. "We'll need (and I am confident will get) more observations in early February to refine the prediction that will bring the uncertainty down greatly," he added.īecause it will occur on the moon's farside, the impact won't be visible from Earth. "At a guess, the above prediction may be wrong by a degree or two minutes from the predicted time," Gray wrote in a blog post (opens in new tab) about the coming impact, citing the difficulty of modeling precisely how sunlight pressure moves a tumbling, cylindrical object such as a rocket stage. The impact will occur on the lunar farside, at about 4.93 degrees north latitude and 233.20 degrees east longitude. Gray, using data gathered by a variety of fellow observers, calculated that the stage will crash into the moon on March 4 at 7:25 a.m. So it's been cruising through the Earth-moon system on a long and looping orbit for nearly seven years. The upper stage was so high after sending DSCOVR on its way, however, that it didn't have enough fuel to return to its home planet, Berger wrote. But the company had yet to pull off a first-stage touchdown at the time of the DSCOVR launch the first such success came in December 2015.) (SpaceX famously lands and reuses the first stages of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. SpaceX usually disposes of Falcon 9 upper stages after launch by sending them back into Earth's atmosphere for a fiery death.
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