Written by: Bobby Brown
The human race is just weeks away from littering a massive piece of our space junk on the moon, in what can be seen as a spectacular Elon Musk moon crash.
The 4-ton rocket booster (seen below) was abandoned in outer space, by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX seven years ago. The Falcon-9 rocket launched a satellite into orbit, before sending it on it’s way into deep space.
While SpaceX has revolutionised the industry by having their super-expensive booster rockets return to earth to be reused, in 2015 they hadn’t quite perfected the technology yet.
During the mission, the Falcon-9 upper stage used up too much fuel, and – caught in the earth and the moon’s gravities – leaving it stranded in a chaotic orbit.
What happens next?
While unpredictable, that orbit has put it on a collision course with the moon.
The discovery was made by amateur astronomer and space coder Bill Gray, who made the announcement in a blog post recently. Essentially just a very expensive piece of space junk now, Gray’s calculations show that the Elon Musk moon crash will happen on 4 March 2022. While the date is in all likelihood accurate, the exact time and location is not entirely clear.
The best-educated guesses from the likes of NASA is that – travelling at roughly 9 200km/h – it will hit near the equator of the far side of the moon, making a sizable crater, that will sadly not be visible from earth.
At that speed, it will most probably cause a small crater, but we will have to depend on images from satellites, including NASA’S Lunar Recon Observer.
The Crisis that is space debris
There’s a bit of excitement that an impact like this may uncover some more of the moon’s mysteries, by causing a dust cloud of sub-surface material to be ejected into its atmosphere.
But while this collision won’t cause any major disaster, like the new movie “Moonfall,” it does again highlight the increasing issue around space junk.
Millions of pieces of bolts and nuts, decommissioned satellite’s, metallic waste, lost astronaut tools and boosters orbit around the earth at massive speeds, posing a danger to space ships. Animals of the cloud of debris are both sobering, and frightening.
There is now a concerted effort from space companies to find a solution to a problem that could soon trap us on earth, prevent us from exploring the final frontier and destroy our satellites.
