The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) – NASA's eye-in-the-sky in orbit around the Moon – has found the crash site of the mystery rocket booster that slammed into the far side of the Moon back on 4 March 2022.
It's a long story. The unidentified rocket first came to astronomers' attention earlier this year when it was identified as a SpaceX upper stage, which had launched NASA's Deep Space Climate Observatory to the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange Point in 2015.
Gray, who designs software that tracks space debris, was alerted to the object when his software pinged an error. He toldon January 26 that"my software complained because it couldn't project the orbit past March 4, and it couldn't do it because the rocket had hit the Moon." Gray spread the word, and the story made the rounds in late January – but a few weeks later, he received an email from Jon Giorgini at the Jet Propulsion Lab .
Giorgini pointed out that DSCOVR's trajectory shouldn't have taken the booster anywhere near the Moon. In an effort to reconcile the conflicting trajectories, Gray began to dig back into his data, where he discovered that he had misidentified the DSCOVR booster way back in 2015.
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