Part of a rocket launched by Elon Musk’s Space-X company is due to crash into the moon.
On March 4, a chunk of the Falcon 9 Booster will crash into the moon’s far side, travelling at 9000km/h.
The abandoned rocket has been in space since 2015, when it ran out of enough fuel to return to earth after delivering a NASA satellite called the Deep Space Climate Observatory. Astronomer Bill Gray told AFP it has been floating in “chaotic orbit” all those years.
Gray told AFP that in his 15 years of tracking junk like the Falcon 9 Booster, this was the first unintentional lunar impact.
Astrophysicist Brad Tucker told 7 News the Booster won’t burn up before it makes contact with the ground, because the moon has no atmosphere.
But he warned that this is an example of a growing problem of space junk, which could be catastrophic for rockets sent into space in the future. “There is no one really to regulate or control this.”
It’s estimated that 30,000 to 80,000 pieces of space junk bigger than 15cm have been left behind, but Tucker told 7 News the number of pieces smaller than that could be “in the hundreds of thousands to millions.”
“Even the small pieces we worry about, because they don’t need to be very big to do a lot of damage when you’re travelling 40,000km/h.”
