The second stage of a SpaceX rocket was to crash next March on the Moon after wandering in space for several years.

The announcement caused a stir at the end of January.

But the astronomers actually misidentified their target.

A piece of rocket will indeed hit the Moon on March 4, but contrary to what had been announced, it is not a rocket from the American company, but rather a Chinese launcher.

This is the stage of a Long March rocket that took off in 2014 for a mission named Chang'e 5-T1, as part of the Chinese space agency's lunar exploration program.

Lack of tracking of space objects

The surprise announcement was made by astronomer Bill Gray, who first identified the future impact, and admitted his mistake this weekend.

This “honest error” highlights “the problem posed by the lack of proper tracking of these objects in deep space”, for his part estimated on Twitter the astronomer Jonathan McDowell.

Because the object in question was actually misidentified several years ago, when it was first detected, explained Bill Gray, creator of software to calculate the trajectories of asteroids and other objects, used by NASA-funded observation programs.

"The object had the expected brightness, appeared at the expected time, and was moving in a consistent orbit," he wrote.

But "in retrospect, I should have observed some strange things about the orbit," he acknowledged.

An “exhilarating” opportunity for NASA

Bill Gray now says he is "convinced" that the object in question "is actually the Chang'e 5-T1 rocket stage".

This test mission was to prepare the subsequent Chang'e 5 mission, which brought samples of the Moon back to Earth.

For its part, NASA had declared at the end of January that it would try to observe the crater which will be formed by the explosion of this object, thanks to its probe currently in orbit around the Moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

The US space agency called the event an “exhilarating research opportunity”.

Studying the crater formed could indeed make it possible to advance selenology, the scientific study of the Moon.

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  • Astronomy

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