A piece of space debris due to crash into the Moon in early March may not be a SpaceX rocket after all.
, who wrote the Project Pluto software used to track near-Earth objects, the object on a collision course is not a discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stage, but a Chinese Long March 3C rocket stage.The object is named WE0913A, and whatever its identity, its calculated trajectory remains correct.
after their payloads have been delivered; generally, they're designed to eventually de-orbit, burning up on re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.. Gray identified it after discovering that WE0913A had gone past the Moon two days after the DSCOVR mission launched, and connected the dots. However, when he figured out that WE0913A was due to collide with the Moon, and this news spread, someone noticed something amiss. Jon Giorgini at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which keeps track of active spacecraft, noted that DSCOVR's orbit doesn't take it close to the Moon. This raised questions about how the rocket could have passed the Moon two days after launch.
Going back to the drawing board to find out what the object could be, he hit upon an object called 2014-065B, the booster stage of a Long March 3C rocket used to launch China's
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