You may recall this story from March: A Dead Chinese Rocket is Crashing Into the Moon on Friday, and Scientists Can't Wait. It seems that nobody wants to admit to owning it - but NASA have now got a picture that might help resolve that question.
Mystery rocket crashes into Moon but no country will take credit:
NASA scientists are baffled by a mystery spacecraft that crashed into the moon, creating two large craters.
The rocket has been tracked through space since 2015, but no one has claimed it. It was travelling at more than 5 kilometres a second when it hit the lunar surface on March 4 this year – and new images by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show that the impact was unlike anything they had seen before.
"Surprisingly, the crater is actually two craters, an eastern one (18m diameter) superimposed on a western one (16m diameter)," scientists from NASA and Arizona State University wrote in a post.
"The double crater was unexpected and may indicate that the body had large masses at each end. Typically a spent rocket has mass concentrated at the motor end; the rest of the rocket stage mainly consists of an empty fuel tank. Since the origin of the rocket body remains uncertain, the double nature of the crater may indicate its identity."
Amateur astronomers first pointed the finger at SpaceX, but then recalculated it was likely to be from a 2014 Chinese lunar mission (Chang'e 5-T1). China has contested this, saying that booster had "safely entered the Earth's atmosphere and was completely incinerated".
A rocket slammed into the moon. NASA got a picture.:
The moon has a strange, new crater. But this one's not natural.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which began mapping the moon in 2009, spotted the impact site of a recent rocket crash on the far side of the moon, which occurred in early March. The space agency published imagery of the impact on Friday, which actually resulted in a double crater: a 19.5-yard crater overlapping with a 17.5-yard crater.
Astronomers expected a wayward rocket booster to slam into the moon, making it the first known time that space debris unintentionally impacted our natural satellite. What NASA didn't expect, however, was a double crater.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2
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printed from SoylentNews, Mystery Rocket Crashes Into Moon but No Country Will Take Credit on 2024-04-19 10:40:23