The rocket stage has been cruising through the Earth-moon system for seven years.
"The upcoming Falcon 9 lunar impact illustrates well the need for a comprehensive regulatory regime in space, not only for the economically crucial orbits around Earth but also applying to"For international spacefarers, no clear guidelines exist at the moment to regulate the disposal at end of life for spacecraft or spent upper stages sent to Lagrange points," ESA officials wrote in the statement.
One such calculation comes from astrodynamics engineer Michael Thompson, of Advanced Space in Westminster, Colorado. He's generated a plot and a visual to show where the upper stage may crash. Thompson built upon the work by Bill Gray of Project Pluto, who collects and analyzes observations of near-Earth objects. It was Gray who discovered the crash course of the SpaceX upper stage.
Project Pluto posts a subset of raw observations made by users around the world. Using these observations, Thompson performed his own orbit determination process in addition to the processes run by Gray., very similar to the prediction generated by Gray. Impact will be near the lunar limb as viewed from Earth, according to these calculations. Most of the distribution lies slightly on the moon's far side. Based on current data, the impact is not expected to be near any NASA Apollo or Chinese lunar exploration sites.The coming crash of a Falcon 9 upper stage on the moon isn't expected to affect the sites of any surface missions.
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