A SpaceX rocket on its way to collide with the Moon has been captured on camera by a space enthusiast. The nearly seven-year-old Falcon 9 rocket “spinning quickly” in the sky as it hurtles towards the Moon was seen on video and still by Gianluca Masi, the Italian founder of the Virtual Telescope Project and proud owner of many high-powered telescopes.
Masi admits that “catching was quite challenging” owing to light interference from the Moon in a post about the four-second video he shot with his 17-inch PlaneWave telescope, called “Elena” after his mother. Despite their low resolution, these photographs are breathtaking – much more so because they were caught by a novice.
“Look at how it blinks as it tumbles!” Masi shouted sweetly in a tweet that included a video of the Falcon 9 flying across the night sky. Bill Gray, an independent orbital dynamics researcher who heads Project Pluto, a near-Earth object tracking project, observed with his team in January 2022 that this Falcon 9 rocket booster appears to be heading straight towards the far side of the Moon by early March.
This less-than-ideal result is likely due to the rocket booster’s age — it was launched in 2015 to put the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Deep Space Climate Observatory into orbit, but got stuck in the gravitational no-man’s-land between the Earth and our Moon, according to Ars Technica.
Gray predicted in an interview with Ars at the time of the discovery that the ancient rocket, which weighs approximately four metric tons and will hit the Moon at 1.6 miles per second, would make “a very fresh impact crater” if researchers were able to locate it. He said that this will present interesting study opportunities, but it is certainly not the desired consequence. We on Earth are having the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to observe a Moon impact in live time as the Falcon 9 spins closer to the moon — or at least, we hope it will be once-in-a-lifetime.
There was a LOT of Moon interference, and the booster was in the same sky as our natural satellite, making it difficult to acquire it. The booster is blinking as it tumbles at a period of roughly 90 seconds, as we can observe. The DSCOVR booster was around 190.000 kilometers away at the time of imaging, about half the distance between the Earth and the Moon. To draw any firm conclusions, however, would be premature.
