A ROCKET on course to smash into the Moon today may in fact belong to China after all.
The schoolbus-sized piece of space junk is due to collide with our rocky satellite at around 12.30pm UK time and its origins are hotly disputed.
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It was spotted tumbling through in January by astronomers and was first thought to belong to SpaceX.
However, closer examination showed that the spent booster is probably part of a rocket that launched a small Chinese spacecraft, called Chang’e 5-T1, towards the Moon in 2014.
Several astronomers who have been tracking the object back the theory, although Beijing has denied the accusations.
Now the space expert who first identified the discarded rocket part claims to have settled the debate once and for all.
Speaking to Live Science yesterday, US astronomer Bill Gray said he is convinced that the “moon crasher” is China’s rocket.
“I’m fairly convinced that there’s no way it can be anything else,” Gray, who developed the asteroid-tracking software Project Pluto, said.
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“At this point, we rarely get anything quite this certain.”
On January 21, Gray first reported that the junk was a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage launched from Florida in February 2015.
It was on a mission to deploy an Earth observation satellite called DSCOVR for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
However, after receiving a tip from a Nasa scientist, he later retracted his claim and said the rocket part most likely belonged to China.
“Back in 2015, I (mis)identified this object as 2015-007B, the second stage of the DSCOVR spacecraft,” Gray wrote last month.
“We now have good evidence that it is actually 2014-065B, the booster for the Chang’e 5-T1 lunar mission.”
Chang’e 5-T1 was an experimental spacecraft that lifted off in October 2014 in preparation for the Chang’e 5 lunar mission.
The mission was part of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program that would eventually make it the third nation to touch down on the Moon after the US and Soviet Union.
But China was having none of it, claiming a few days later that the upper stage of the mission safely burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
“According to China’s monitoring, the upper stage of the Chang’e-5 mission rocket has fallen through the Earth’s atmosphere in a safe manner and burnt up completely,” Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
However, experts noticed that China referred to the 2020 Chang’e-5 mission, not the similarly named Chang’e 5-T1 mission at the heart of the accusations. Both are completely different.
On March 1, Gray’s theory was backed up by the U.S. Space Command, which tracks near-Earth objects, after its astronomers confirmed that the Chang’e 5-T1 mission’s upper stage never deorbited.
“It’s on the orbit that an awful lot of lunar missions take; its inclination means that, in the past, it was headed out over China; it was going east in the way Chinese lunar missions do; and its estimated launch time falls within 20 minutes of the Chang’e 5-T1 rocket,” Gray told Live Science.
The lunar impact is expected to produce a cloud of debris and leave behind a small crater, though no serious damage will occur.
It will be the first time a manmade object has crashed into another space body without being aimed there.
The collision will occur on the far side of the Moon as the one-tonne hunk of space junk is travelling at around 2.6km per second.
Once the dust has settled, Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will move into position to snap images of whatever’s left behind.
These images could prove crucial to scientists hoping to get a better understanding of space collisions.
They could also help to determine once and for all the origins of the rocket by studying whatever manmade debris is left behind.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
