Sections of lunar terrain about 500 meters long taken by LRO show the impact site and twin craters formed by Chang’e 5-T1 R/B – Photo: NASA
According to Space.com, an unidentified object collided with the Moon on March 4, 2022, leaving a double crater up to 29 meters across. Scientists believe that this object is not an asteroid.
Initially, it was speculated that the object was the upper stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket (USA) that was used to launch the Earth observation satellite DSCOVR. However, launch monitoring agencies soon rejected this theory.
A group of mechanical and aerospace engineers from the University of Arizona, California Institute of Technology, Project Pluto and the Planetary Science Institute (USA) recently announced that they had found evidence that the object had collided. The moon (symbol WE0913A) on March 4, 2022 is a Chinese booster rocket with an unidentified object attached.
In an article published in the journal Planetary Science JournalThe research team said they monitored WE0913A for seven years before it crashed on the moon’s surface.
During research on WE0913A, the team retraced its path and discovered that it was the booster for the Chang’e 5-T1 mission. It is one of several missions launched by China to test the feasibility of sending a probe to the Moon and sampling lunar rocks.
The team tried to learn more about the rockets by comparing their light curves as they moved through space.
They found that it did not wobble like other boosters. Instead, something is driving it forward in an orderly manner. Usually there is a booster on one side of the rocket. It is an empty shell with a heavy engine. This asymmetry of the rocket often causes it to wobble as it ascends.
But there is no such shaking phenomenon in the Chinese rocket, which suggests that Chinese engineers have added “something else” to the housing opposite the engine to optimize its weight distribution.
Whatever that “something else” was, it created a crater when the booster hit the moon’s surface, the researchers noted.
According to science page physics.org, China does not comment on the above information.
exciting race to the moon
(TagstoTranslate)Moon(T)Rocket(T)Mysterious object(T)Moon rock(T)Moon probe
