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.)”
