LONDON: A three-ton rocket part was due to crash into the moon on Friday, astronomers said.
The space debris is expected to smash into the far side of the moon at approximately 5,800mph, creating a crater between 33 and 66 feetwide — enough to fit two double decker buses.
However, the impact will not be visible from Earth and may take months to confirm with satellite images.
Space debris is a big concern for the space community, not least because a collision with a satellite could wipe out the services people rely on every day, such as cellular networks.
However, the discarded rocket is not worrying experts too much, and astronomer Bill Gray, who first identified the collision course, has said the moon is used to much more severe batterings.
Writing on his blog Project Pluto, Gray said: “Keep in mind that this is a roughly four-tonne object that will hit at 2.58 km/s.”
Gray added that, “The moon is fairly routinely hit with larger objects moving in the ballpark of 10-20 km/s hence the craters.”
Jacob Geer, head of space surveillance and tracking at the UK Space Agency, said: “Although this particular piece of space junk isn’t likely to cause any significant damage, we are concerned about the growing amount of debris in orbit above the Earth.”
If the debris were to collide with satellites, this could have major impacts on services such as mobile phones and online banking.
“That’s why the UK is taking action, by funding new technology to track or even remove debris from space and working with international partners, including the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) to lead efforts to promote space sustainability.”
According to the European Space Agency, there is around 9,200 tonnes of space debris, with 34,000 objects greater than 10cm in size and128 million objects measuring from 1mm to 1cm.
It estimates there have been more than 560 break-ups, explosions,collisions or non-typical events resulting in fragmentation.
While rocket launches have placed about 10,680 satellites in Earth’s orbit since 1957, around 6,250 of these remain in space, but only3,700 are still functioning.
Initially, after the collision course was identified by Gray in January, astronomers thought the rocket part had been launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX programme.
But following further analysis, a month later he suggested the object was not actually a SpaceX Falcon rocket upper stage from a 2015launch, but was likely to be a Chinese rocket launched in 2014 as part of the Chang’e 5-T1 mission. China, however, has denied this. — dpa
