It turned out that the part of the rocket that will hit the moon does not belong to Falcon 9

It was revealed that the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket belonging to SpaceX, launched in 2015 a while ago, would hit the Moon on March 4, and it had an important place on the agenda. Astronomer Bill Gray, who was the first to report this situation, recently made a new post. It was stated that the rocket piece that will hit the Moon is not a Falcon 9 piece and is most likely the upper stage of China’s Long March 3C rocket launched in 2014.

The rocket part that will hit the moon is not Falcon 9

Bill Gray and a group of astronomers, who developed software to monitor asteroids and planets in the last days of January, were released by NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory ( DSCOVR) revealed that the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket used to launch its research will hit the Moon on March 4.

After this situation was discovered, Jon Giorgini of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California sent Gray an e-mail saying that the trajectory of the rocket stage, which is stated to hit the Moon, did not match the trajectory of the DSCOVR spacecraft. Continuing his research, Gray concluded that Giorgini was right.

Upon reexamination, Gray revealed a announced in a blog post that the best candidate for the part of the spacecraft that will hit the Moon is Chang’e 5-T1, an experimental space probe launched with the Long March 3C rocket as part of China’s Lunar Exploration Programme.