A SpaceX rogue rocket has put India’s Chandrayaan-2 in jeopardy. The rocket is on a course to crash land on the moon after floating around in space for nearly 7 years.
The rocket, Falcon 9, was launched in February 2015 from Florida and was an interplanetary mission to deploy weather satellite on a million-mile journey across the space. The debris in question, the second stage of the rocket, wasn’t left with enough fuel to traverse the return path. “It lacked the energy to escape the gravity of the Earth-Moon system (to return to earth’s atmosphere) …it has been following a somewhat chaotic orbit since February 2015,” wrote meteorologist Eric Berger in a post on Ars Technica.
The rocket is said to be weighing about 4 metric tonnes and flowing at a velocity of 2.58 km per second and is said to crash into moon soon, as per a report by The Guardian. The rocket “made a close lunar flyby on January 5 (and will make) a certain impact at March 4 (on the far side of the moon, near the equator),” wrote Bill Gray, a software writer for tracking near-Earth objects, in his blog. “This is the first unintentional case (of debris hitting the Moon surface) of which I am aware… (I am) rooting for lunar impact,” Gray wrote further. However, it is difficult to analyse the exact the path its is traversing and at which spot it will hit. This unpredictability puts India’s Chandrayaan-2 in danger.
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Factors such as impact of sunlight “pushing” the debris and “ambiguity in measuring rotation periods… are very small. But they will accumulate between now and March 4,” Gray wrote further. Chandrayaan-2 can however, record the collision impact, as per media reports.
Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, from Harvard University, wrote on Twitter that second stage hitting the moon surface is “not a big deal.” This is not the first time that SapceX debris has countries worried about safety of their own mission. In December last year, China’s complained to UN space agency that it’s space station Tiangong dodged Starlink satellites twice in July and October. This provoked heavy criticism of Elon Musk from China’s Weibo users. They called SpaceX as “a pile of space junk” and slammed the US government for “space warfare weapons” as per media reports.
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SpaceX has not been facing technical issue, but on the organizational front as well. Some former interns allege that the space company ignored incidents of sexual harassment, as per a report by The New York Times. SpaceX is a private space firm owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Chandrayaan-2 is India’s second lunar exploration launched in September 2019. While the orbiter was successfully deployed, Vikram Lander (lunar rover) failed to land successfully.
