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It’s not SpaceX that is going to be crashing into the Moon on March 4th. 

In late January, it was widely reported that the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster rocket was going to collide with the moon. Now astronomers say it is almost certain it is a Chinese booster rocket from the Chang’e 5-T1 mission.  

That’s not SpaceX

Astronomer Bill Gray, developer of Project Pluto, a software program for tracking near-Earth-objects, comets, asteroids, and other space junk made the initial inaccurate identification.  

The portion of the rocket “had made a close lunar flyby on January 5,” Bill Gray said. Supposedly the Falcon rocket was out-of-control for seven years. And it was headed straight into the moon.

He estimated that the object was 4 tons and would collide with the Moon on March 4, 2022.

  Jon Giorgini, a scientist working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), was the first to alert astronomer Bill Gray to the case of mistaken identity.

 JPL doesn’t track every scrap of space junk. But they do track all NASA missions, all satellites and active spacecraft.

It was the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) mission, which launched to space seven years ago on top of the falsely accused Falcon 9 rocket. Giorgini informed Gray that DSCOVR’s trajectory was nowhere near the Moon. So, it is highly unlikely that the booster was anywhere near the lunar surface.

Correcting the record

The truth is out there. And it’s not SpaceX. 

Now Bill Gray is busy correcting what he told the world just last month. But it is an understandable mistake. Space is big. And there are so many things floating around out there. It’s a very difficult job to identify and catalog everything.

Gray went back to check his results. Astronomers of the Catalina Sky Survey had originally detected the unidentified object, giving it the placeholder designation WE0913A. 

Gray said in the blog that now there was evidence that the object was not SpaceX Falcon 9.

  “Essentially, I had pretty good circumstantial evidence for the identification, but nothing conclusive. That was not at all unusual. Identifications of high-flying space junk often require a bit of detective work, and sometimes, we never do figure out the ID for a bit of space junk; there are a couple of unidentified bits of junk out there. (At least, not identified yet.)”

With the Falcon 9 booster ruled out, he took a look at earlier missions. That’s when China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission was discovered. And it looks like the associated Long March 3C rocket launched on October 23, 2014. And a small spacecraft was intended to land on the moon. They are sending it to await a lunar sample return mission.

The errant object is still scheduled to crash-land on the moon on March 4, Gray said in his blog. But there is no danger to life or equipment. 

There is a myriad of sky tracking systems. Besides JPL, there is the Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network (SSN). SSN tracks, almost 30,000 pieces of orbital debris, or “space junk.” 

We really need to know what’s out there. And although it seems like everybody is looking at the sky, it may be time for a more seamless system.