Elon Musk is no stranger to global controversies, but he was ultimately completely cleared regarding the scandal of the rocket that crashed on the Moon in 2022.
On March 4 of that year, an unidentified rocket crashed into the western edge of the far side of the Moon, creating a double crater 29 meters in diameter upon impact. It was initially determined to be the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that launched the DSCOVR mission in 2015.
DSCOVR is SpaceX’s first interplanetary mission. Launched on February 11, 2015, it placed the eponymous climate observatory, operated by NOAA, at the Lagrange point L1, more than a million kilometers from Earth.
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To successfully insert DSCOVR, the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket had to reach a record altitude. As a result, the rocket lacked the fuel to return to Earth’s atmosphere and the kinetic energy to escape the gravity of the Earth-Moon system.
In the years that followed, the rocket followed an erratic trajectory that led astronomers to predict its impact with the Moon. The controversy erupted in January 2022, when two renowned American scientists (Bill Gray, author of the Project Pluto software for tracking near-Earth objects, and Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center) predicted that the second stage of Falcon 9 would would crash into the moon on March 4, 2022.
Although the calculations were correct (a rocket ended up crashing into the far side of the Moon on March 4), the object they were observing had been misidentified. It was not a Falcon 9, but a stage of a Chinese rocket.
A crater signed by China, not by SpaceX
In February 2022, a month before the impact, Jon Giorgini of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote to Bill Gray to tell him that the object they were tracking was not the DSCOVR mission rocket. NASA had located SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and it was not on a close trajectory to the Moon. So what was this object?
Assuming that it was artificial and not natural in origin because it orbited the Earth and not the Sun, Gray reviewed launches prior to March 2015 until he found some one that corresponds to reality. He found one: the Chinese Chang’e 5-T1 mission.
Chang’e 5-T1 was launched on October 23, 2014 to test a re-entry capsule, a precursor to the 2020 Chang’e 5 mission that China used to bring its first samples of lunar soil back to Earth.
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The object that was to crash on March 4 on the far side of the Moon was probably 2014-065B, the third stage of a Chinese Long March 3 rocket which had deployed the Chang’e 5-T1 mission capsule September years earlier.
How to ensure this this time? Jonathan McDowell compared the rocket’s orbital elements with a cubesat that had followed the same path, and the match was very close. However, a rocket’s upper stages can change orbit and do strange things when they contain fuel debris.
Until, late last year, the Planetary Science Journal published a University of Arizona-led study that corroborated the object’s origin. Researchers analyzed the object’s composition and trajectory and confirmed that it looked more like a Chinese rocket than a Falcon 9.
By studying the reflection of light on the surface of the object as it moved through space, the researchers determined that it was a rocket stage from the Chang’e 5-T1 mission and not of a second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, while the Chinese space agency claimed that its launcher had burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere years earlier.
According to the study, the object resembled a dumbbell, with two large masses at each end, hence the double impact crater. One of the masses was the two 1,090-kilogram engines without fuel, while the other end was what gave the rocket its stability, a support structure or some sort of additional instrument. It was the first time that astronomers observed a double crater.
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Despite the controversy, this is neither the first nor the last time a human spacecraft has crashed on the Moon. Tardigrades (microscopic animals) could even live on the Moon, in the unlikely event that they survived the impact of the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet in 2019.
Ten years earlier, NASA went so far as to intentionally crash a rocket into the Moon in order to study the materials that would be ejected by the explosion. The difference is that NASA didn’t try to hide it from the rest of the world.
Article written in collaboration with our colleagues from Xataka.
