High-profile articles are already flourishing around the world… But what will happen on March 4? The upper stage of the rocket Falcon 9
of the DSCOVR mission will crash into the far side of the Moon
. A non-event, relatively rare these days, but which above all will have no influence!
If fans hadn’t followed it, it probably would have gone unnoticed.
Crash test
On February 11, 2015, SpaceX sent the small DSCOVR probe out of Earth orbit, towards the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point L1, 1.5 million kilometers from our planet. The liftoff was very important for Hawthorne’s company, since it was the first time that NASA and NOAA had entrusted SpaceX with such a distant mission… And everything had gone well. Since then, the mission has continued to monitor solar flares, and it is well known thanks to its Epic camera, facing the Earth, of which it constantly “sees” a half-sphere. And the upper stage of Falcon 9? It is in an orbit around the Earth… But chaotic.
Indeed since 2015, its trajectory has been influenced several times by the Moon. Which could very well have led to it being ejected from Earth orbit… But ultimately leading to it crashing into our natural satellite on March 4th. The point of impact is still imprecise, and the (amateur) team that made this discovery hopes to have a more reliable estimate by early February. Either way, it will be on the far side of the Moon, so don’t expect, like some fanciful visuals, to see any impact.
It’s raining Falcon 9s (no)
And even if it were possible to observe precisely the impact of the floor, the latter will be very limited. This upper block of Falcon 9 weighs 4 tons (mainly because of its single rocket engine), which will not change anything on the lunar surface, which undergoes hundreds of impacts from small asteroids each year (just like the Earth of elsewhere, even if for us they are consumed in the atmosphere). It will eventually be possible, when the trajectory and the point of impact will be refined, that one of the orbiters in operation around the Moon will be able to photograph, or even film the impact: Chandrayaan-2 (India) and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (USA) are both capable of photographing the surface with an accuracy better than 50 cm/pixel.
There remain the sensationalist announcements of some. It is wrong to say that the stage is “out of control”, it is quite simply inert and is not likely to rotate by surprise. Equally fanciful are articles that worry about orbiters (imagine how unlucky it is for an impact, given the volumes discussed) or ground missions (there’s only one on the far side, near the South Pole). The palm is perhaps to be given to the site Wionwhich illustrates his article with a vehicle… Which itself crashed on the Moon.
Run for your lives!
Because yes, crashing vehicles on the Moon is not that rare. There have of course been failed missions, such as Vikram or Beresheet recently, but also stages voluntarily sent to the Moon as in 2007 (Atlas V stage) or during the Apollo missions. This does not make it a “trash can” as some titles regret, even if there are a few tens of tons of metal in pieces, on an area the size of Asia. Not to mention finally that there is little to pollute on site: no atmosphere, and an inert surface subjected to the work of solar erosion for hundreds of millions of years. Falcon 9 isn’t going to reveal anything… And it’s not the last time parts will break in place.
Source: SPACE
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