A Dead Chinese Rocket is Crashing Into the Moon on Friday, and Scientists Can't Wait

upstart writes:

A Dead Chinese Rocket Is Crashing Into the Moon on Friday, and Scientists Can't Wait:

The strange story of a big hunk of space junk that's on a collision course with the moon comes to an explosive end Friday, and astronomers are eager to view the fallout.

An old rocket booster once thought to be the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9, but now believed to be from the Chinese Chang'e 5-T1 mission (although China denies this), will slam into the moon's far side at over 5,000 miles per hour.

Bill Gray, an amateur astronomer and software developer in Maine, first noticed the terminal trajectory. His software picked up the impact in an orbital model and Gray worked with observatories around the world to gather additional data and increase his confidence in the prediction.

[...] "I am astounded that we can tell the difference between the two rocket body options -- SpaceX versus Chinese -- and confirm which one will impact the moon with the data we have," Adam Battle, a planetary science graduate student at the University of Arizona said in a statement in February. "The differences we see are primarily due to type of paint used by SpaceX and the Chinese."

In a blog post, Gray wrote that "with all the data, we've got a certain impact at March 4 12:25:58 Universal Time (4:25 a.m. PT)." Jonathan McDowell, a leading watcher of orbit and everything near Earth in space, confirmed the prediction.

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