![]() ![]() However, WE0913A wasn't orbiting the sun, like an asteroid would, but was orbiting Earth instead. The object (assigned the temporary name WE0913A) was first glimpsed by the Catalina Sky Survey, an array of telescopes near Tucson, Arizona that scans our cosmic neighborhood for dangerous asteroids that could smash into Earth. Gray made his first prediction that the controversial debris would collide with the moon after it was spotted tumbling through space in March 2015. "At this point, we rarely get anything quite this certain." ![]() "I'm fairly convinced that there's no way it can be anything else," Gray told Live Science. Gray wrote on his blog soon after the images were released that the object is "quite conclusively identified as the Chang'e 5-T1 booster." But some astronomers think they have most of the mystery figured out already. (Image credit: China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation)Īs the rocket booster is likely to have totally disintegrated upon impact, it’s uncertain if investigating the craters will provide any big clues to its controversial origin. Chinese officials, however, disagreed, claiming that this rocket's upper stage burned up in Earth's atmosphere years ago.Ī Long March 3C rocket launched Chang'e 5 T1, China's first round-trip uncrewed moon mission, from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in October 2014. But later observations and analysis of orbital data hinted that the object was the spent upper stage of China's Chang'e 5-T1 rocket, a spacecraft ( named after the Chinese moon goddess ) which launched in 2014. When Gray first spotted the debris, he suggested that it was the second stage of a Falcon X rocket launched by Elon Musk's SpaceX in 2015. astronomer and developer of software that tracks near-Earth objects, predicted that the orbiting piece of space junk would hit the moon's far side in a matter of months, Live Science previously reported. ![]() The unexpected dual craters add an extra layer of strangeness to a mystery that has confounded space watchers since January, when Bill Gray, a U.S. The photos show that the wayward debris (the origins of which are still contested) somehow punched out two overlapping craters when it smashed into the far side of the moon traveling at roughly 5,770 mph (9,290 km/h). Images of the crash site were taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on May 25 and released on June 24. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |