![]() ("Cislunar" refers to the region between the Earth and moon.) ![]() Objects "left in cislunar orbit are unstable - will eventually either hit the moon or the Earth or get perturbed to solar orbit," he added in another tweet. ![]() It's interesting, but not a big deal," astronomer and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote via Twitter on Tuesday (Jan. "For those asking: yes, an old Falcon 9 second stage left in high orbit in 2015 is going to hit the moon on March 4. Gray's calculations have been confirmed by others in the know. But nailing down its time and location is still important, potentially allowing moon-orbiting spacecraft such as NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and India's Chandrayaan 2 to study the resulting crater - "and, if we're lucky, maybe image the impact," Gray wrote. "We'll need (and I am confident will get) more observations in early February to refine the prediction that will bring the uncertainty down greatly," he added.īecause it will occur on the moon's farside, the impact won't be visible from Earth. "At a guess, the above prediction may be wrong by a degree or two minutes from the predicted time," Gray wrote in a blog post about the coming impact, citing the difficulty of modeling precisely how sunlight pressure moves a tumbling, cylindrical object such as a rocket stage. The impact will occur on the lunar farside, at about 4.93 degrees north latitude and 233.20 degrees east longitude. Gray, using data gathered by a variety of fellow observers, calculated that the stage will crash into the moon on March 4 at 7:25 a.m. ![]() So it's been cruising through the Earth-moon system on a long and looping orbit for nearly seven years. The upper stage was so high after sending DSCOVR on its way, however, that it didn't have enough fuel to return to its home planet, Berger wrote. But the company had yet to pull off a first-stage touchdown at the time of the DSCOVR launch the first such success came in December 2015.) (SpaceX famously lands and reuses the first stages of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. SpaceX usually disposes of Falcon 9 upper stages after launch by sending them back into Earth's atmosphere for a fiery death. Mike Wall is the author of " Out There " (Grand Central Publishing, 2018 illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. EDT (1630 GMT) on June 17 with news of successful liftoff, rocket landing and satellite deployment. The company has already launched 24 missions in 2022, 15 of them dedicated Starlink flights.Įditor's note: This story was updated at 12:30 p.m. This intense 36-hour stretch will continue a very busy year for SpaceX. Today's mission kicked off a planned rocket tripleheader for SpaceX, which also intends to launch a radar satellite for the German military on Saturday morning (June 18) and a commercial communications satellite early Sunday (June 19). The company has now launched more than 2,700 Starlink craft to orbit, and the number will continue to increase far into the future the next-generation version of the network could eventually consist of up to 30,000 satellites. Starlink is SpaceX's constellation of internet satellites. SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites could be used for GPS navigation SpaceX launches 53 Starlink satellites, lands rocket in quickest booster turnaround to date SpaceX Starlink satellite internet terminals arrive in Ukraine
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