A piece of rocket from the space company Space X, led by the richest person on the planet, Elon Musk, will hit the Moon in the coming weeks, after seven years of uncontrolled travel through Earth's orbit, experts have reported.
The second stage of the Falcon 9 spacecraft, which was launched from Florida in 2015 as part of
a mission to monitor Earth's climate from space,
will thus become the first human-made object to inadvertently and unintentionally hit the satellite. control.
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Since 2015, with no fuel to return to Earth and insufficient power to escape the gravity of Earth and the Moon and travel through space, the rocket has drifted like a piece of space debris, according to the newspaper. The country.
But experts now calculate that this phase of the Falcon 9 rocket - a tank weighing four tons - will plummet to one side of the Moon, near the center of the visible face, on March 4 at a speed of 2.58 kilometers per second.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon space capsule lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center on April 23, 2021 in Cape Canaveral, Florida.Brynn Anderson / AP
Bill Gray, who writes computer programs for tracking near-Earth objects, said the piece of rocket had already flown over the Moon, near its surface, on January 5.
"This is
the first unintended case [
of space debris hitting the Moon] that I'm aware of," Gray added.
The exact place where the rocket will impact is not yet known, but it may not be observed from Earth, experts say, and it will go unnoticed due to its very small size.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, agreed that the impact is expected on March 4 and indicated that
"it was not a big deal,"
according to The Guardian newspaper.
But for other experts the impact of the rocket against the Moon could be positive for scientific reasons.
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"It makes it possible to analyze what the impacts are like in different gravities, how the particles behave in that different environment, and it also helps to see a little beyond the surface, [because] by altering it you access fresher material," said Julia de León , an expert in tracking space objects at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, in Spain.
Bill Gray, for his part, is not so enthusiastic: "
We already know what happens
when [space] junk hits the Earth; there's not much to learn from that," he concluded.