A rocket launched by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX is on a collision course with the Moon after seven years in orbit, according to satellite trackers.
The Falcon 9 booster rocket was first used in 2015 to propel the US Deep Space Climate Observatory to a Sun-Earth LaGrange point more than 1 million km away.
It then didn’t have enough fuel to return to Earth and lacked the energy to escape the gravity of the Earth-Moon system and has been in a somewhat chaotic orbit since.
Bill Gray, who uses software to track near-Earth space objects, projects that it will crash into the Moon on March 4. He says that it is the first unintentional case of space junk hitting into the Moon that he is aware of.
However, he doesn’t believe there are any safety issues to be concerned about.
“Keep in mind that this is a roughly four-ton object that will hit at 2.58 km/s,” he wrote in a blog post.
“The moon is fairly routinely hit with larger objects moving in the ballpark of 10-20 km/s; hence, the craters. It’s well-built to take that sort of abuse”.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, also appeared nonplussed about any potential danger from the crash writing on Twitter that it’s “not a big deal”.
US consumers lost $770 million in social media scams in 2021
A growing number of US consumers are being scammed through social media, according to a new report from the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
More than 95,000 consumers told the FTC that they had been scammed in…
