Robinson said he worried that “it was going to take us a year of imaging to fill in the box.” That meant the researchers had to search a swath about 50 miles long for a crater a few tens of feet wide, comparing the lunar landscape before and after the crash to identify recent disturbances.ĭr. Experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory calculated a location a few miles to the east, while members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory expected that the crash would occur tens of miles to the west. Gray’s software made one prediction of the impact site. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was not in a position to watch the impact, but the hope was that a freshly carved crater would show up in a photograph that the spacecraft took later. At the predicted time, it slammed into the far side of the moon within the 350-mile-wide Hertzsprung Crater, out of sight of anyone on Earth.

Regardless of what rocket it was part of, the object continued to follow the spiraling path dictated by gravity. Students at the University of Arizona reported that an analysis of the light reflected from the object found that the mix of wavelengths matched similar Chinese rockets rather than a Falcon 9. Gray concluded that the most likely candidate was a Long March 3C rocket that was launched from China a few months earlier, on Oct. Gray said the rocket part was the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 that launched the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in February 2015.Ī NASA engineer pointed out that the launch trajectory of DSCOVR was incompatible with the orbit of the object Mr. But the exact orbit of the object was not known, so there was some uncertainty about the time and place of the impact. The crash was certain, at about 7:25 a.m. He realized it was on a collision course with the far side of the moon. The rocket crash intrigue started in January when Bill Gray, developer of Project Pluto, a suite of astronomical software used in calculating the orbits of asteroids and comets, tracked what looked like the discarded upper stage of a rocket.

What happend to the moon march 4