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Falcon 9 rocket in the sky after a launch in 2017
Photo: George Rose/Getty Images
Everything actually went smoothly on the mission in 2015: the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida went smoothly.
On board the powerful, two-stage rocket was the Deep Space Climate Observatory, an earth observation satellite from the US weather agency NOAA, which is intended to keep an eye on the strength and direction of the solar wind in addition to the earth's hemisphere in order to warn of violent solar storms.
As planned, the rocket dropped the satellite into space and it began its 1.5 million kilometer journey to its destination, the L1 Lagrange point, where the gravitational pull of the Earth and Sun almost cancel each other out.
The James Webb Space Telescope has just arrived at the Lagrange point L2.
But at some point, after the satellite was already on board, there was a problem with the second stage of the "Falcon 9".
At this point, the rocket was so high that it could not return to Earth's atmosphere, where it burned up.
There wasn't enough fuel for that.
Normally, however, this is exactly what should happen with the "Falcon 9" while the first stage returns to earth to be used again.
But this time, the second stage of the rocket remained in space and took a strange orbit - on a collision course with the moon.
Experts assume that the rocket stage, which weighs around four tons, will hit the moon at a speed of around 2.5 kilometers per second in a few weeks.
Already on January 5th she came very close to the moon.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, confirmed on Twitter that the space junk will most likely hit there on March 4th.
The astronomer Bill Gray, who reports on the event in a blog entry, also assumes this date based on his calculations.
The rocket stage is expected to impact the far side of the moon that day, but there are still some uncertainties.
"Space debris can be a bit tricky," writes the software expert for tracking near-Earth objects about the calculations of the exact course.
Further observations of the object are necessary in order to specify the time and place of the impact.
He has already asked other astronomers to provide data on the orbit of the Falcon 9 stage.
According to Gray, it is the first case of space junk accidentally hitting the moon.
However, nobody from our planet can observe the impact on the far side of the moon.
joe