A rocket section probably from a Chinese rocket stage launched for a lunar mission in 2014 is set to crash on to the surface of the Moon in the first week in March.
The debris was initially mistaken for a Falcon 9 booster from a 2015 launch by billionaire Elon Musk’s space exploration programme SpaceX.
Data analyst Bill Gray, who made the initial misidentification, says he made an error and now believes the wreckage is a rocket launched in October 2014, as part of China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission that sent a small spacecraft to the Moon. This view was corroborated by Professor Jonathan McDowell from the US-based Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
MacDowell said there were limited resources for tracking space debris.
‘We rely on a small handful of volunteers who do it on their own time. So there is limited scope for cross-checking.’
The BBC reports that objects close to Earth are tracked by a team at the US military’s Space Force, but junk further out in deep orbit is left unobserved.
[Image: https://pixabay.com/photos/earth-moon-ache-sunrise-space-1388003/]