Some piece of space debris is soon to slam into the Moon.
The origin of that debris has been hard to identify.
Initially, it was thought that it was debris from one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 missions in 2015.
That was eventually ruled out.
Then the finger was pointed at China and that the debris is part of one of their Long March rockets.
Bill Gray, an astronomer and space tracker, first predicted that it would slam into the Moon on March 4th after years of orbiting the Earth.
After some follow-up analysis, Gray claimed that he was mistaken and that the debris was actually an old rocket stage leftover from China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission from 2014, which tested out technology needed to bring samples back from the Moon.
Now China have said that the debris isn’t from one of their missions.
However, it’s possible that China may have mixed up which mission the debris originally came from, as most evidence points to it being an old Chinese rocket.
Gray’s conclusion that the object is a Chinese rocket has been backed up by analysis from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and by a team at the University of Arizona.
But China is now officially weighing in on the matter and is potentially disputing American astronomers’ claims.
“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 during a press conference on February 21st.
Gray and others are claiming that the rocket is from the Chang’e 5-T1 mission, which is a separate flight altogether.
Chang’e 5-T1 was a precursor mission to Chang’e-5, which actually launched in 2020.
And the booster from that mission did fall back to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere.
As for Chang’e 5-T1’s booster, Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron (responsible for tracking space debris) says on its tracking website that it burned up in Earth’s atmosphere in October of 2015.
Gray thinks the Space Control Squadron (thy have a Twitter account here) came to the wrong conclusion.
He believes that the booster burning up was a prediction made on a single set of data taken a year before the alleged burn-up.
It’s a bit like saying with certainty what the weather will be like in 1 year (in other words, not a very accurate prediction).
So Gray continues to think that the Chang’e 5 booster actually made its way out of Earth orbit and towards the Moon.
The only other explanation he has come up with is that there was a hidden payload on that mission that’s the cause of all the speculation.
But he doesn’t think that’s likely as there is no supporting documentation for there being a hidden payload.
So, all signs seem to point to the rocket coming from China.
For Gray, what all of this confusion shows is that better tracking of deep space junk is very much needed.
He argues that entities launching objects like this should make their rockets’ positioning data publicly available and that someone — or some (probably international) agency — should maintain all of that information.
No matter where this disputed piece of debris came from, one thing is still certain: it’s going to raise some moondust on March 4th when it impacts the Moon.
Top image: Part of a Chinese Long March 3C, shown here, is thought to be the piece of debris about to slam into the Moon in March. But China is casting doubt on that claim.
