SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket booster has been confirmed to have collided with the lunar surface, leaving rare traces of an artificial collision.
On the 5th (local time), the scientific community and foreign media outlets such as CBS News reported that the SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage rocket booster, weighing about 4000kg, collided with the lunar surface in the early morning.
The rocket body, measuring approximately 13.7m in length and 3.7m in width, crashed into the lunar surface at a speed of about 8690km/h. The impact is estimated to have created a huge crater approximately 30m wide and 4.8m deep, with a force equivalent to about 3 tons of TNT.
Dr. Carl Schmidt, a planetary scientist at Boston University's Center for Space Physics, explained that such events are very rare and that this will be an important opportunity to understand the workings of the lunar atmosphere. Dr. Schmidt added that through spectroscopic observations of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, columns of sodium and lithium gas were captured, which are clear evidence of the collision.
The debris from the collision is part of the Falcon 9 rocket that launched two lunar landers in January last year. While the Firefly's 'Blue Ghost-1' lunar landing was successful, the IceSpace's 'Kuto-R' crash-landed. The released upper stage of the rocket drifted into lunar orbit due to solar activity and gravitational effects.
Juliana Shayman, head of SpaceX's NASA Science and Dragon Program, stated that the rocket disposal process was carried out as planned, but a combination of solar winds and gravity caused the orbit to shift towards the moon.
NASA relayed that independent researchers had predicted that the rocket booster would definitely collide near the 'Einstein Crater' and 'Bell Crater' on the western edge of the moon.
Since the collision occurred on the bright side of the moon, it was difficult to detect the flash with the naked eye or a regular telescope. However, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured images before and after the collision, and it is expected that image analysis will be completed within 1-2 weeks. Scientists hope to obtain valuable data by analyzing the gas and lunar dust ejected by the collision to understand the amount of ice storage and geological characteristics beneath the lunar surface.
This collision, while being used for scientific data collection, has raised concerns about the increasing management of space debris. Since the Apollo program in the 1960s, there have been 209 tons of artificial debris left on the lunar surface. With the addition of the 4t debris from the Falcon 9 collision, the amount of artificial debris on the moon has increased further.