A runaway rocket fell on the moon | to know

The rocket part weighed about four tons and crashed onto the surface of the moon at a speed of about 9000 kilometers per hour. The missile created a small crater and a dust column. Scientists hope to have confirmation in the coming days or weeks.

Bill Gray of Project Pluto mentioned that a SpaceX rocket was launched in 2015, but later retracted it. Now he says it might be a Chinese missile. The Chinese foreign minister denied this in February of this year. He said their missile re-entered the atmosphere and burned completely.

The rocket component was first seen from Earth in March 2015. It was spotted by a NASA-funded space survey in Arizona, but it quickly lost interest when it turned out not to be an asteroid. The rocket portion is what’s known as “space junk,” which is discarded by missions or satellites without enough fuel or energy to return to Earth. Some pieces are closer to us, just above Earth, but others, like this one, are thousands of miles away in high orbit, far from Earth’s atmosphere.

This is the first time a piece of trash has accidentally hit the moon. The European Space Agency estimates that there are now about 36,500 pieces of space debris larger than 10 centimeters flying through space. Space monitoring is expensive and the risk to humans from debris in high orbit is low. Only a few volunteer astronomers spend their spare time doing calculations. They send emails and alerts back and forth, asking who is in the best place on Earth to spot an object in space.

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