Space debris collides with the moon's surface in early March

China on Monday denied that a piece of a rocket set to crash on the moon in March was a remnant of one of its rockets, despite what experts say.

At the end of January, astronomer Bill Gray, the creator of a program that allows calculating the paths of asteroids and other objects, announced that the space debris expected to crash on March 4 was part of a SpaceX rocket.

But he retracted that announcement last week, admitting he was wrong, and now says the space debris is part of a Chinese missile launched in 2014.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry, which denied this when asked about the matter, confirmed that the missile (launched in 2014) "reentered the Earth's atmosphere again without posing any danger and burned completely."

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that Beijing is faithfully committed to the long-term continuity of its space activities.

According to Bill Gray, whose program is used by the monitoring programs funded by the US space agency (NASA), the object in question belongs to the "Long March" rocket that was launched during the launch of the "Changi 5-T1" spacecraft as part of the lunar exploration program of the Chinese space agency.

China landed a spacecraft on the hidden side of the moon in early 2019, a global precedent.

In the past, the Asian giant has lost control of spacecraft, including in May 2021 when most of the first layer of a Long March-5B rocket disintegrated over the Indian Ocean.

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