After months of scrutinizing photographs of the lunar surface, scientists have finally found the crash site of a forgotten rocket stage that struck the far side of the moon in March.
They still do not know for sure which rocket the wayward debris originated from. And they are perplexed about why the impact excavated two craters and not just one.
“It’s cool, because it’s an unexpected outcome,” said Mark Robinson, a professor of geological sciences at Arizona State University who serves as the principal investigator for the camera aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been photographing the moon since 2009. “That’s always way more fun than if the prediction of the crater, its depth and diameter, had been exactly right.”
Robinson reported the discovery Friday on the website that stores images taken by the lunar orbiter.
The rocket crash intrigue started in January when Bill Gray, developer of Project Pluto, a suite of astronomical software used in calculating the orbits of asteroids and comets, tracked what looked like the discarded upper stage of a rocket. He realized it was on a collision course with the far side of the moon.
The crash was certain, at about 7:25 a.m. Eastern time on March 4. But the exact orbit of the object was not known, so there was some uncertainty about the time and place of the impact.
Gray said the rocket part was the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 that launched the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in February 2015.
He was wrong.
A NASA engineer pointed out that the launch trajectory of DSCOVR was incompatible with the orbit of the object Gray was tracking. After some more digging, Gray concluded that the most likely candidate was a Long March 3C rocket that was launched from China a few months earlier, on Oct. 23, 2014.
Students at the University of Arizona reported that an analysis of the light reflected from the object found that the mix of wavelengths matched similar Chinese rockets rather than a Falcon 9.
But a Chinese official denied it was part of a Chinese rocket, saying that the rocket stage from that mission, which launched the Chang’e-5 T1 spacecraft, had reentered Earth’s atmosphere and burned up.
Regardless of what rocket it was part of, the object continued to follow the spiraling path dictated by gravity. At the predicted time, it slammed into the far side of the moon within the 350-mile-wide Hertzsprung Crater, out of sight of anyone on Earth.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was not in a position to watch the impact, but the hope was that a freshly carved crater would show up in a photograph that the spacecraft took later.
Gray’s software made one prediction of the impact site. Experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory calculated a location a few miles to the east, while members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory expected that the crash would occur tens of miles to the west.
That meant the researchers had to search a swath about 50 miles long for a crater a few tens of feet wide, comparing the lunar landscape before and after the crash to identify recent disturbances.
Robinson said he worried that “it was going to take us a year of imaging to fill in the box.”
While the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed the vast majority of the moon several times over the past 13 years, there are spots it has missed. It turned out that some of the gaps were near the expected crash site.
Robinson remembered thinking of Murphy’s Law and joking, “I know exactly where it’s going to hit.”
Because the crash was predicted a month ahead of time, the mission team was able to fill in most of the gaps.
Then the search started.
Usually, a computer program does the comparison, but that works best if the before-and-after pictures are taken at the same time of day. For this search, many of the images were taken at different times, and the difference in shadows confused the algorithm.
With all the false positives, “we just sat down and had several people manually going through the millions of pixels,” Robinson said.
Alexander Sonke, a senior in Arizona State’s geological sciences department, contributed to the effort. He estimated that he had spent about 50 hours over several weeks performing the tedious task.
Sonke graduated in May. He got married. He went on his honeymoon. A week and a half ago was his first day back at work — he is about to embark on his graduate school studies with Robinson as his adviser — and he resumed the search for the impact site.
He found it.
Sonke said he had seen “a group of pixels that looked significantly different in brightness” as the before-and-after images blinked back and forth.
“I was pretty confident when I saw it that this was a new geologic feature,” Sonke said. “I certainly jumped out of my seat a little, had a feeling that this was definitely it, and then tried to kind of restrain my excitement.”
The eastern crater, about 20 yards in diameter, is superimposed on the slightly smaller western one, which most likely formed a few thousandths of a second before the eastern one, Robinson said.
This is not the first time a spacecraft part has hit the moon. For example, pieces of the Saturn 5 rockets that took astronauts to the moon in the 1970s also carved craters. But none of those impacts created a double crater.
The reason this one did might point to its mystery identity. The October 2014 Chinese mission carried the Chang’e-5 T1 spacecraft, a precursor for another mission, Chang’e-5, which landed on the moon and brought rock samples back to Earth.
The precursor T1 spacecraft did not include a lander, but Robinson surmises that it had a heavy mass at the top of the stage to simulate the presence of one. If so, then rocket engines at the bottom and the lander simulator at the top could have created the two craters.
“That’s sheer speculation on my part,” Robinson said.
The other parts of the rocket stage would have been thin, light aluminum, not likely to make much of a dent on the lunar surface.
The actual impact site lay between the sites predicted by Gray and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, close to the NASA one. “It was within the margins of error that we had computed,” Gray said.
It was also fortunate that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team had filled in the gaps — called gores, in the language of mapmakers — in the images. “As Murphy would have it, that thing impacted in what was one of the gores,” Robinson said. “If I hadn’t been alerted, we wouldn’t have had a before image.”
The scientists might eventually have found the crash site. Dirt tossed out from a gouged crater is usually brighter, growing darker over time. That is how scientists identified the craters caused by Saturn 5 stages.
But they would still be looking for one small bright spot in the haystack of the moon.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The body of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei — who died after being set on fire by her partner in Kenya — was received Friday by family and anti-femicide crusaders, ahead of her burial a day later.
Cheptegei’s family met with dozens of activists Friday who had marched to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital’s morgue in the western city of Eldoret while chanting anti-femicide slogans.
She is the fourth female athlete to have been killed by her partner in Kenya in yet another case of gender-based violence in recent years.
Viola Cheptoo, the founder of Tirop Angels – an organization that was formed in honor of athlete Agnes Tirop, who was stabbed to death in 2021, said stakeholders need to ensure this is the last death of an athlete due to gender-based violence.
“We are here to say that enough is enough, we are tired of burying our sisters due to GBV,” she said.
It was a somber mood at the morgue as athletes and family members viewed Cheptegei’s body which sustained 80% of burns after she was doused with gasoline by her partner Dickson Ndiema. Ndiema sustained 30% burns on his body and later succumbed.
Ndiema and Cheptegei were said to have quarreled over a piece of land that the athlete bought in Kenya, according to a report filed by the local chief.
Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month before the attack. She finished in 44th place.
Cheptegei’s father, Joseph, said that the body will make a brief stop at their home in the Endebess area before proceeding to Bukwo in eastern Uganda for a night vigil and burial on Saturday.
“We are in the final part of giving my daughter the last respect,” a visibly distraught Joseph said.
He told reporters last week that Ndiema was stalking and threatening Cheptegei and the family had informed police.
Four in 10 women or an estimated 41% of dating or married Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or most recent partner, according to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
