It’s most likely a leftover Chinese rocket booster.
Now, this particular object has been getting a ton of attention, since Gray first predicted in January that the deep-space object would collide with the Moon on March 4th. But after taking a closer look at the object’s history and getting some new details from NASA, Gray is fairly convinced that this object is a leftover piece of a Chinese rocket, specifically a Long March 3C that launched China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission to the Moon.
China’s Long March 3C launching in 2010. Part of the same rocket is thought to be on a collision course with the Moon.Gray says he realized the case of mistaken identity when he got an email from someone at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who keeps track of active space missions. JPL has its own tracking system, and the JPL employee argued that it was unlikely that the Falcon 9 would have passed close by the Moon two days after the DSCOVR launch. “He happened to think, ‘Wait a minute.
“I think we can say that we have a very solid chain of evidence for it,” Gray says. “Running the orbit back to launch for the Chinese spacecraft makes ample sense. It winds up with an orbit that goes past the Moon at the right time after launch.” Despite the confusion about the object’s identity, Gray says this is just further proof that we need more information about these rocket boosters that go to deep space. As Gray argues, some people’s general attitude toward these kinds of objects is that we don’t need to pay attention to them once they are in space, since they are so far out in orbit. As of now, no formal entity is consistently tracking leftover rockets like this that go into deep space trajectories.
Ultimately, Gray says it would be better if those who launch deep space rockets had to report the last known location of their vehicles, to make it easier to track and identify the lost parts. Of course, China is notorious for releasing very little information about its space missions. “This sort of thing would be considerably easier if the folks who launch spacecraft — if there was some regulatory environment where they had to report something,” Gray says.
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