NASA scientists say they've just found the crash site of a mystery spacecraft on the moon. Two large craters were left from the rocket, but no one is quite sure who's rocket it is.
It's also strange that the rocket debris left two craters and not just one.
Mark Robinson, a professor of geological sciences at Arizona State University who serves as the principal investigator for the camera aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, was excited about the discovery.
It's cool, because it's an unexpected outcome. That's always way more fun than if the prediction of the crater, its depth and diameter, had been exactly right.
At least 47 NASA rocket bodies have created "spacecraft impacts" on the moon, according to 2016 data from Arizona State University. However, no other rocket body impacts on the moon created double craters.
NASA scientists explained,
The double crater was unexpected and may indicate that the body had large masses at each end. Typically a spent rocket has mass concentrated at the motor end; the rest of the rocket stage mainly consists of an empty fuel tank.
Bill Gray, who developed Project Pluto a suite of astronomical software used in calculating the orbits of asteroids and comets, discovered the discarded upper stage of a rocket on a collision course with the moon back in January, and the crash was calculated to have occurred on March 4, but the exact location of the crash was only just discovered.
Mr. Gray said that the rocket part was a section of a SpaceX Falcon 9 for the DSCOVR mission; however, NASA engineers dismissed that hypothesis saying the DSCOVR launch trajectory was incompatible with the orbit of the object.
Mr. Gray now believes it was a Chinese Long March 3C rocket possibly from the Chang'e 5-T1 lunar mission, but the Chinese said the pieces of that mission were recovered or burned up on reentry.
And since we all know that we can implicitly trust both our government and the Chinese, and they're all denying it was them, I assume the Chinese have just delivered the first raw materials of their new moon base, or Elon Musk literally sent some Dogecoin to the moon just for fun.
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