- Oct 17, 2011
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On Aug. 5 at around 2:34 a.m. ET, the upper stage of a discarded Falcon 9 rocket will collide with the moon at 5,400 miles per hour near the crater Einstein on the western lunar limb, according to Bill Gray, who runs Project Pluto and develops software for tracking astronomical objects.
Gray was the first to calculate that the object would hit the moon and has been tracking it since. He also co-authored a study on the impact with an international team of researchers who recently made their work available on the open-access preprint arXiv server. The paper has not been peer-reviewed.
"We expect that to vaporize the booster, create a flash of light, probably a plume of ejecta -- dust, regolith, other stuff mixed into it -- and of course excavate a fresh crater on the lunar surface," Benjamin Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the lead author of the study, told ABC News.
Fernando said the impact event offers scientists a unique opportunity. He said we often see meteoroids striking the lunar surface, but it's often difficult to know the mass and speed of the objects. Because the researchers know those two variables for the upper stage, they can use the impact as a "calibration event to test all of the techniques that we use for studying natural impacts, which we don't know are going to happen in advance, unlike this event," according to Fernando.
On Aug. 5 at around 2:34 a.m. ET, the upper stage of a discarded Falcon 9 rocket will collide with the moon at 5,400 miles per hour near the crater Einstein on the western lunar limb, according to Bill Gray, who runs Project Pluto and develops software for tracking astronomical objects.
Gray was the first to calculate that the object would hit the moon and has been tracking it since. He also co-authored a study on the impact with an international team of researchers who recently made their work available on the open-access preprint arXiv server. The paper has not been peer-reviewed.
"We expect that to vaporize the booster, create a flash of light, probably a plume of ejecta -- dust, regolith, other stuff mixed into it -- and of course excavate a fresh crater on the lunar surface," Benjamin Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the lead author of the study, told ABC News.
Fernando said the impact event offers scientists a unique opportunity. He said we often see meteoroids striking the lunar surface, but it's often difficult to know the mass and speed of the objects. Because the researchers know those two variables for the upper stage, they can use the impact as a "calibration event to test all of the techniques that we use for studying natural impacts, which we don't know are going to happen in advance, unlike this event," according to Fernando.
