Gray, who is well known in the space community for monitoring objects in orbit-he provided the tracking software that helped pinpoint a space rock that used to orbit Earth like a second moon-first noticed the debris in 2015. But this latest incident appears to be the first of its kind: entirely unplanned. The first spacecraft to ever reach the lunar surface, for example, smashed into it on purpose in 1959 because the Soviet Union was eager to beat the United States to it, even if it meant destroying a probe. But we’ve usually done it for specific reasons, such as national glory or scientific curiosity. Humankind has actually been chucking stuff at the moon for decades, and not just astronauts. When you think about it that way, we’re kind of throwing trash at the moon. The hardware, no longer useful after a successful launch, was just discarded in space. “It would almost completely cover a basketball court,” Bill Gray, an amateur astronomer who tracks space objects, told me.Īccording to Gray, the space junk turned out to be a discarded rocket booster from a Chinese mission that sent a spacecraft toward the moon in 2014. Astronomers can’t see the aftermath yet but, based on the size of this thing, they believe that the impact has scooped out a new crater as wide as 20 meters, or 65 feet.

The hardware came barreling head-on at the lunar surface at 5,800 miles an hour, into an existing, enormous crater. The debris, a piece of a rocket about the size of a school bus, had been floating in space for seven years. This morning, a piece of space junk smacked right into the far side of the moon. Today, because of human beings and their little space things, Earth’s celestial companion got one more dent.

Space rocks are still at it, and every year the bombardment scoops out dozens of craters big enough for moon-orbiting spacecraft to notice. The moon is a wonderland of craters-thousands of them, carved by asteroids hitting the surface over billions of years.

What happend to the moon march 4