No alarm you, but the SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage booster is on its way to crash into the moon. The giant tin can has been orbiting the Earth and the moon since it deployed a space weather monitoring spacecraft for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2015. Now, it’s time to go. Its wandering will end when it crashes into the far side of the moon March 4as predicted by Bill Gray, who writes software to track near-Earth objects.
As far as anyone can tell, it will be the first piece of space junk to hit the moon, but it won’t do any harm. Otherwise, it’s a symptom of a larger problem. Many derelict boosters have been abandoned over the past few decades in orbit around the Earth and the Sun, where their flares pose an impact risk to active spacecraft, including including those that provide communications, broadband, GPS and other services on which we depend. Recently, news coverage has focused on the dangers of small shrapnel, like fragments from a derelict satellite that Russia blew up in November, then nearly passed the International Space Station. But things can always get worse.
“Every year, something the size of a school bus is involved in a collision within 100 metres. And if they do, it will be a level worse than the worst anti-satellite test,” said Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a nonpartisan consulting organization. based in Broomfield, Colorado, says.
The oldest huge pile of space junk dates back to 1959: It was the Vanguard rocket body, left over from the deployment of a US Navy weather satellite, one of the early launches of the contest between the two. United States and the Soviet Union and was one of the first to be tracked in orbital objects. Then, as the space race begins, the discarded rocket bodies accumulate. And it must be: They are part of a multistage rocket needed to propel spacecraft into orbit or beyond Earth’s atmosphere. When an upper-stage booster deploys that device, it is usually out of orbit or on a similar trajectory. Some even have fuel left in them, which also makes them an explosion hazard. Weeden said there could be thousands of used boosters floating in orbit.
And those are just things in low Earth orbit. The same challenges apply further in space, even when there is more room to work. “Whenever we put something in interplanetary orbit, a deep space sensor or something like that, there’s a good chance there’s an intensifier attached to it. Bruce McClintock, head of the Rand Corporation’s Space Enterprise Initiative, a nonprofit research organization based in Santa Monica, California, said: “Space is so vast that people never think to it.
The first rocket to orbit the sun got there in 1959, but it was a coincidence. A Soviet lunar mission was suppose McClintock said to throw a spacecraft at the moon, but the rocket in the upper stage misfired and it narrowly missed the target. When SpaceX launched a red Tesla Roadster Four years ago, with a spacesuit dummy in the driver’s seat, it also orbited the sun.
