Space debris flying around not only endangers the operation of satellites in orbit, it no longer spares the moon either.
This Friday at 1.25 p.m. German time, for the first time in the history of space travel, a large piece of debris will crash onto our satellite in an unplanned and uncontrolled manner.
The object is most likely the upper stage of a Chinese Long March launch vehicle that was launched on October 23, 2014.
On board she transported the lunar probe Chang'e 5-T1, which orbited the moon and returned to earth.
Only remnants of the launch vehicle remained in space, including the third stage.
Manfred Lindinger
Editor in the department "Nature and Science".
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The collision course of the vagrant debris was noticed earlier this year by the American amateur astronomer Bill Gray, who initially thought it was a stage of a Falcon 9 rocket.
Gray has long tracked the trajectories of asteroids, space debris, and other objects and calculated their likely routes.
For said object, the calculated route suddenly ended on March 4 in the immediate vicinity of the moon.
The American space agency (NASA), which had not originally paid much attention to the debris due to its highly elliptical orbit, also became aware of Gray's observation.
China denies everything
After evaluating further data, Gray and the NASA scientists responsible then corrected their statements that it was a Space X rocket that was launched from Cape Canaveral in 2015 and had launched an Earth observation satellite.
When, after more detailed analyzes of the trajectories in 2014 and 2015, the suspicion of a Chinese rocket stage fell, the Chinese space agency immediately denied it.
The Long March rocket was completely burned.
Because the crash occurs on the far side of the moon, the event will not be observable from Earth.
Evidence of the impact will be only a small fresh crater, which one of the current orbiters in lunar orbit might one day detect.
Whichever rocket stage is going to land on the moon - it is not the first piece of scrap on our satellite.
During its Apollo missions, NASA, among other things, left the lunar vehicles behind and caused decoupled lunar modules to crash in a targeted manner - with the aim of obtaining information about the nature of the lunar crust from the vibrations via the seismometers left behind.
For Bill Gray, the unplanned crash is a sign that the trajectories of space debris need to be monitored much better and more systematically in order to avoid such a mess - and potentially dangerous situations - in the future.