The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Found (LRO)NASA eye in the sky in lunar orbit, on the crash site of the mysterious booster rocket that hit the far side of the moon on March 4, 2022.
According to RT, it is surprising that the photos of LROrevealed that the impact crater, which was formed by the impact of the missile, is actually two craters, an eastern crater (18 meters in diameter) superimposed on a western crater (16 meters in diameter), which constitutes a new mystery for astronomers to uncover.
The double crater was unexpected and may indicate that the missile body had large masses at each end.
Mark Robinson, Principal Investigator in the Camera team, explained LRO: “The spent rocket mass is usually concentrated at the end of the engine, and the rest of the rocket stage consists mainly of an empty fuel tank. Since the origin of the missile body remains uncertain, the dual nature of the crater may help establish its identity“.
Since the origin of the missile body remains uncertain, the dual nature of the crater may indicate its identity.
No other rocket object on the Moon has produced double craters, as Apollo SIV-B Four craters, but none of them were double craters, rather they were somewhat irregular in outline, and were much larger than all of the newly discovered double craters.
Astronomer Bill Gray, who first discovered the uncontrollable object in space and predicted it would hit the moon, explains that the booster “came about 15 degrees from vertical. So that’s not the explanation.”
The unidentified rocket first caught the attention of astronomers earlier this year when it was identified as the upper stage of the SpaceX rocket, which launched NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory. (DSCOVR) to the Lagrange point L1 (Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange Point) in 2015.
Gray, who designs software that tracks space debris, reported the object on January 26, likely affiliated with “SpaceX”, but a few weeks later, he received an email from John Giorgini at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)indicating that the path DSCOVR The booster should not be taken anywhere near the moon.
In an attempt to reconcile conflicting paths, Gray began looking back at his data, discovering that he had misidentified the out-of-control object, and that SpaceX was not the culprit..
A little investigative work led Gray to determine that the object was in fact the upper stage of a mission Chang’e 5-T1 Chinese, a 2014 technology demonstration mission that laid the foundation for Chang’e 5which successfully returned a lunar sample to Earth in 2020.
Jonathan McDowell has provided some supporting evidence that appears to support this new theory of object identity.
A few days later, the Chinese Foreign Minister confirmed that this body is not a task enhancer Chang’e 5-T1which fell out of orbit and crashed into the ocean shortly after launch.
And as now, Gray remains convinced that the booster Change 5-T1 It was he who hit the moon, suggesting that the Secretary of State made a mistake in confusing Chang’e 5-T1 AndChang’e 5 Likewise, whose booster has already sunk into the ocean.
And for the new double crater on the moon, the fact that the team LRO Being able to find the impact site so quickly is an impressive feat in itself, because it was discovered just months after the collision, with a little help from Gray and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who each independently narrowed the search area to a few tens of kilometers.
For comparison, it took to find the impact site of Apollo 16 – S-IVB More than six years of careful research to find it.