Mystery rocket ‘to crash into Moon in THREE days’ as China denies it’s to blame

AN OUT-OF-CONTROL rocket part the size of a school bus will smash into the Moon this week.

The impending collision has sparked a war of words over who’s responsible – here’s what we know so far.

GettyChina says it is not responsible for a hunk of space junk that will soon hit the Moon[/caption]

When will the rocket hit the Moon?

According to astronomers, a rocket booster will hit the lunar surface on March 4 after spending nearly eight years tumbling through space.

It will be the first time a manmade object has crashed into another space body without being aimed there.

The collision will occur on the far side of the Moon as the one-tonne hunk of space junk is travelling at around 2.6 km per second.

It is expected to produce a cloud of debris and leave behind a small crater, though no serious damage will occur.

The smash-up poses no threat to humans or other spacecraft.

The object is probably part of a rocket that launched a small Chinese spacecraft, called Chang’e 5-T1, towards the Moon in 2014.

Who predicted the collision?

In January, space trackers calculated that a piece of manmade debris was on course to hit the Moon.

It was first spotted by Bill Gray, who writes the popular Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects.

He reported that the junk was a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage launched from Florida in February 2015.

It was on a mission to deploy an Earth observation satellite called DSCOVR for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

However, Bill later retracted his claim and said the rocket part most likely belonged to China. China has since denied the accusation.

“Back in 2015, I (mis)identified this object as 2015-007B, the second stage of the DSCOVR spacecraft,” Gray wrote on February 12.

“We now have good evidence that it is actually 2014-065B, the booster for the Chang’e 5-T1 lunar mission.”

Does the rocket belong to China?

The blame game over the rogue rocket part intensified last week after China said that it is NOT theirs.

Gray, however, still thinks it’s an old rocket part from a lunar mission dating back to 2014.

His claims have been backed up by Nasa and other experts.

They believe it’s from China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission, which was used to test technology for bringing samples back from the Moon.

But China is having none of it.

“According to China’s monitoring, the upper stage of the Chang’e-5 mission rocket has fallen through the Earth’s atmosphere in a safe manner and burnt up completely,” Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

However, experts noticed that China referred to the Chang’e-5 mission, not the similarly named Chang’e 5-T1 mission at the heart of it – both are completely different.

GettyThe rocket part will hit the Moon on March 4, according to astronomers[/caption]

So now astronomer Gray believes the country got the two missions “mixed up”.

What the confusion shows is that there should be better tracking of deep space junk, he argues.

“Many more spacecraft are now going into high orbits, and some of them will be taking crews to the Moon,” Gray said.

“Such junk will no longer be merely an annoyance to a small group of astronomers.

“A few fairly simple steps would help quite a bit.”

Has space junk hit the Moon before?

The rocket part is still expected to hit the Moon on March 4, where it will leave a crater about 65 feet in diameter on the surface.

Unfortunately, it won’t be possible to see the impact live as the tumbling rocket part is expected to hit the Moon’s far side – the part that faces away from Earth.

Instead, astronomers will rely on images snapped by satellites including Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to view the aftermath of the crash.

By analysing the resulting crater, scientists hope to observe subsurface material ejected by the impact to shed light on the Moon’s composition.

As part of its LCROSS mission, in 2009 Nasa deliberately smashed a rocket booster into the Moon in hopes of learning something from the debris it left behind.

“In essence, this is a ‘free’ LCROSS… except we probably won’t see the impact,” Gray wrote in January.

NasaNasa’s LCROSS spacecraft was deliberately smashed into the Moon in 2009[/caption]

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