The impact of a mysterious rocket that hit the Moon more than three months ago has finally been found by astronomers.
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From the beginning of 2022, experts knew that this rocket was going to crash into the Moon on March 4. They had calculated that the impact had to occur in a crater called Hertzsprung, which is 570 kilometers wide.
They were right: researchers from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission announced on June 23 that they had spotted two craters, a very rare fact.
One is about 59 feet (18 meters) wide while the other is about 52 feet (16 m) in diameter, reports the specialized site Space.com.
“The double crater was unexpected and may indicate that the rocket body had large masses at either end,” wrote Mark Robinson of Arizona State University, the principal investigator of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC).
The origin of the rocket remains mysterious. Early speculation suggests it is likely the upper stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) mission for NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in February 2015 .
Further observations and calculations have changed this assumption, leading many scientists to conclude that the rocket body was likely part of the Long March 3 booster that launched China’s Chang’e 5T1 mission around the Moon in October 2014. China has denied this claim.
Rocket bodies have already crashed into the lunar surface; for example, NASA directed the third stages of Saturn V rockets to the Moon several times during the Apollo program.
But these were intended impacts. The March 4 impact is the first unintended human-made impact to hit our satellite.