Nobody seems to want to claim ownership of the spent rocket booster that struck the Moon. But scientists don't care: the impact will be a teachable moment.
Observers have been tracking a chunk of space junk, waiting for it to strike the Moon. It should’ve hit the far side of the Moon, and hopefully, orbiters will have images of the impact site, though that might take a while.
Bill Gray from Project Pluto calculated that the space junk would hit at or near the green x in this image. Hertzsprung crater is an enormous impact crater on the lunar far side, and it’s about 570 km in diameter. Image Credit: Bill Gray/Project Pluto. NASA’s LRO carries a suite of scientific instruments, including a camera system called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera . LROC captures high-resolution images of the lunar surface. It’s spotted equipment left behind by the Apollo missions, so it should be able to find the impact site and what’s left of the space junk.
There’s a lot that scientists don’t know about impact craters. Impact craters are everywhere, and they’ve been imaged and studied in depth. But this is a chance to see a newly-formed crater. And in this case, we know the mass of the impactor, and we know its velocity. Scientists can also tell the object’s orientation at the time of impact from the crater shape and the ejecta. The impact will also reveal data about the impact site itself.
When we look at planets like Mercury and Earth’s Moon, we see surfaces that have been battered by impacts for billions of years. There’s a lot scientists still don’t know about the impact process and the physics behind it. “A deeper understanding of impact physics will go a long way in helping researchers interpret the barren landscape of the Moon and also the effects impacts have on Earth and other planets,” Hayne writes.
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