Previously, scientists predicted that the rocket that would hit the Moon would belong to SpaceX.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA – Astronomers and space tracking experts made a surprise by predicting rockets SpaceX Falcon 9 will collide with month in March this year. The rocket has been left in space for the past seven years.
However, that prediction has changed due to rocket tracked and still on a collision course with the moon is not an old Falcon 9 but an ancient Chinese rocket. The update comes from the astronomer and asteroid tracker running Project Pluto named Bill Gray.
Initially, the object was first detected by the Catalina Sky Survey, a program that uses a telescope near Tucson, Arizona to track objects that are potentially dangerous to Earth. As the tracking progresses, astronomers find objects that are man-made.
A number of clues led Gray and his colleagues to think it was one of SpaceX’s rockets, specifically the Falcon 9 launched in February 2015. However, Gray admits that identifying such an object is not always concrete.
“I have pretty good circumstantial evidence for identification, but nothing conclusive,” Gray wrote in a new blog post.
Now, this particular object has been getting a lot of attention. Especially since Gray first predicted the object would collide with the moon in March.
However, after taking a closer look at the object’s history and getting some new information from the US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Gray is pretty sure that the object he found was a remnant of a Chinese rocket. In particular, the Long March 3C which launched the China Chang’e 5-T1 mission to the moon.
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