{"id":526,"date":"2022-03-02T15:23:29","date_gmt":"2022-03-02T15:23:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/03\/02\/a-rocket-is-still-set-to-slam-into-the-moon-next-month-but-it-may-not-be-from-spacex-after-all\/"},"modified":"2022-03-02T15:23:30","modified_gmt":"2022-03-02T15:23:30","slug":"a-rocket-is-still-set-to-slam-into-the-moon-next-month-but-it-may-not-be-from-spacex-after-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/03\/02\/a-rocket-is-still-set-to-slam-into-the-moon-next-month-but-it-may-not-be-from-spacex-after-all\/","title":{"rendered":"A rocket is still set to slam into the Moon next month \u2014 but it may not be from SpaceX after all"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/2\/13\/22931817\/china-change-5-t1-rocket-spacex-falcon-9-moon-collision<\/a>
\n
<\/br><\/code><\/p>\n

\n

Last month, an astronomer and space tracking expert made a bit of a splash when he predicted that a piece of an old SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket<\/a> left in space for the last seven years was going to collide with the Moon this March. But now he\u2019s changing that prediction in a big way. While the rocket part he\u2019s been tracking is still on a collision course with the Moon, he now believes that the vehicle is not an old Falcon 9 part, but an old Chinese rocket instead.<\/p>\n

The update comes from Bill Gray, an astronomer and asteroid tracker running Project Pluto<\/a>, who has been following this doomed object since March of 2015. He says the object was first picked up by the Catalina Sky Survey, a program that uses telescopes near Tucson, Arizona to scan the sky for potentially dangerous asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth. When the survey found this particular object, other astronomers noticed that it wasn\u2019t orbiting the Sun like asteroids typically do. It was actually orbiting the Earth, suggesting that the object was human made and something that we put into space ourselves.<\/p>\n

\n