Today at 14:25 GMT it is expected to crash into the «dark» (invisible from Earth) side of the Moon, near Herzprung crater at the Moon's equator, the stray fragment of an older missile of unknown origin.
The impact will not be visible from Earth's telescopes. It is the first time a human space junk will crash into another celestial body.
The three-tonne giant piece of space junk, moving at a speed of almost 9,300 kilometres per hour, was initially thought to be part of a US Space X Falcon 9 rocket (launched in 2015) and then a Chinese rocket (the Chang'e 5-T1 launched in 2014) - something that China continues to categorically deny.
Astronomers expect the impact to create a crater 10 to 20 metres in diameter. The US space agency's LRO lunar satellite (NASA) will probably see the impact site, but probably after a few weeks.
This was preceded in 2009 by the NASA-controlled moon landing of its lunar satellite LCROSS, but also by the deliberate impact on the Moon of parts of the large Saturn 5 rockets used in the Apollo missions of the 1970s and 1970s. The first spacecraft to land on the Moon was the Soviet Luna 2 in 1959, while the most recent examples are the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft in 2019 and the Chinese Chang'e 5 in 2020.
More than 12,000 satellites have orbited the Earth since the space age began in 1957 and around 5,100 of them are still in operation. The European Space Agency (ESA) estimates that at least 36,500 pieces of space «junk» over 10 cm in size are currently circulating in space around our planet, posing a risk to space missions. This «junk» includes dead satellites and various rocket parts.
Around the Moon, according to Nature, it is estimated that there are more than 150 objects, of which at least 90% are «junk».«.
