Friday, March 29

The appearance of a strange double crater increases the mystery of the rocket that crashed into the Moon


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It has been less time than expected, but the POTspecifically the orbiter Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), has managed to find the impact site where the remains of a mysterious rocket – whose origin is still not known for sure – that crashed into the far side of the Moon on March 4. And the finding, contrary to what it may seem, has generated more questions than answers, since a strange double crater which further baffles astronomers.

Specifically, it is a hole 18 meters wide superimposed on another 16something that would not be strange at all, since with the right angle and speed, this type of impact could occur.

However, the main ‘suspect’ of the event, a stranded Chinese rocket, had a trajectory that does not match this double crater. “It puzzles me a bit, although I’m not an expert on high-velocity impacts like this,” he explains in a
release
Bill Grayastronomer who directs the program Pluto Project, tracking distant space objects, and first to spot and calculate the trajectory of the body. “A theory has been circulating that if it were an impact at a shallow angle, it could create an elongated or double crater; but debris from the Chinese Chang’e 5-T1 rocket entered about 15 degrees from vertical. So that’s not the explanation for this case.”

Enlarged image of the double crater
Enlarged image of the double crater – NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University

For its part, Mark Robinson, principal investigator of the LRO team, proposes that this impact could be caused by an object with an unevenly distributed mass, with larger parts at its ends. “Usually a spent rocket has concentrated mass at the end of the motor; the remainder of the rocket stage consists primarily of an empty fuel tank. Since the origin of the rocket body remains uncertain, the dual nature of the crater may help indicate its identity », he states in a
note issued by NASA
.

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“No other rocket body impact on the Moon created double craters. The four craters of Apollo SIV-B they were somewhat irregular in outline (Apollos 13, 14, 15, 17) and substantially larger (over 35 meters) than each of the double craters. The maximum width (29 meters) of the double crater of the mysterious rocket body was close to that of the S-IVBs,” says Robinson.

These four images show craters formed by impacts from the Apollo SIV-B stages: crater diameters range from 35 to 40 meters
These four images show impact craters from stages of Apollo SIV-B: crater diameters range from 35 to 40 meters – NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University

Whose is the rocket?

The controversy goes back a long way. At first, Gray pointed out that the object in question was the upper stage of the rocket. Falcon 9 that SpaceX launched to put the satellite into orbit Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) in February 2015. However, further analysis revealed that its orbit did not match, by the astronomer’s own admission. “It more closely resembles the orbit of the upper stage of the rocket that launched China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission in 2014,” he later noted. Several later independent works also supported this possibility.

However, the Asian giant denies that the remains are from one of its rockets: “According to China’s monitoring, the upper stage of the rocket related to the mission entered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned completely,” he said about it. the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Wang Wenbin. It is not the first time that China has been criticized for not properly managing its space debris. Last year, for example, the 23-tonne core stage of its massive rocket Long March 5B
crashed uncontrollably into the sea shortly after launch. And, as a general rule, such large pieces are knocked down in a controlled manner for safety reasons.

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Still, his theory was first supported by tracking data from the US Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron (18 SPCS), which suggested that Chinese rocket debris did indeed re-enter. in the atmosphere in 2015. But Gray refuted this information, arguing that this analysis was based on information extrapolated from the orbit coordinates, not on the actual confirmation of the fact. And it seems to be true, since the 18 SPCS secured for ‘
SpaceNews
‘ than the Chang’e 5-T1 stage which had no confirmation of its descent into the atmosphere.

Mystery Status: Unsolved

Although he admits that the results are strange, Gray continues to defend his theory that, indeed, the remains of the Chinese rocket are responsible for the double crater. “The object is fairly conclusively identified as the Chang’e 5-T1 booster. (However, I can fully understand that the folks at LRO don’t want to say much on that point. It’s fine for me, as an unaffiliated researcher in the field, to lay out the evidence and say there’s no real doubt about it. It could be more complicated for them),” he writes.

The astronomer indicates that the Chinese Foreign Minister made a mistake (unintentionally, according to him) in the name of the rocket between Chang’e 5 – a rocket that successfully transported the first rover to set foot on the far side of the Moon and which, as indicated, did crash into the sea- and the Change 5-T1, with a very similar nomenclature. “There was some confusion over this largely my fault: I initially misidentified this as a booster for NASA’s DSCOVR mission, one that actually escaped into orbit around the Sun. Then the Chinese Foreign Ministry thought that we were talking about the Chang’e 5 booster instead of the 5-T1 booster, but they are two different items. The CE-5 booster was tracked back from the Moon and impacted in the middle of the Pacific less than a week after launch. The CE-5-T1 booster spent more than seven years wandering through the Earth-Moon system, before reaching the far side of the Moon on March 4, 2022.”

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A very quick find

NASA warned that it would still take months for a lunar orbiter or ship to find the remains of the impact. A fairly optimistic forecast, since, for example, it took six years to find the crater created by Apollo 16 S-IVB. In this case, the collaboration between Gray and NASA, who independently narrowed the search area to a few dozen kilometers, made it possible to find the remains much more quickly.

“We were pretty sure the LRO team would have to do a little searching around the impact sites we pinpointed. In fact, the impact crater was found five miles from where JPL put it and about 10 miles from where I put it. It’s a little further away than any of us expected, but it’s not surprising,” says Gray.

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