With the LCROSS mission, NASA deliberately impacted a spent rocket upper stage into the Moon in 2009 for this purpose. This information is important because it will allow satellites presently orbiting the Moon, including NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and India's Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft, to collect observations about the impact crater. But they will accumulate between now and March 4, and further observations are needed to refine the precise time and location of the impact. "These unpredictable effects are very small," Gray writes. As the object is tumbling, it is difficult to precisely predict the effects of sunlight "pushing" on the rocket stage and thus making slight alterations to its orbit. With this new data, Gray now believes that the Falcon 9's upper stage will very likely impact the far side of the Moon, near the equator, on March 4. According to Bill Gray, who writes the widely used Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, asteroids, minor planets, and comets, such an impact could come in March.Įarlier this month, Gray put out a call for amateur and professional astronomers to make additional observations of the stage, which appears to be tumbling through space. Now, according to sky observers, the spent second stage's orbit is on course to intersect with the Moon. It also lacked the energy to escape the gravity of the Earth-Moon system, so it has been following a somewhat chaotic orbit since February 2015. After the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage completed a long burn to reach a transfer orbit, NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory began its journey to a Sun-Earth LaGrange point more than 1 million km from the Earth.īy that point, the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage was high enough that it did not have enough fuel to return to Earth's atmosphere. As the boosters landed beyond the horizon, two consecutive sonic booms shook me to my core again.SpaceX launched its first interplanetary mission nearly seven years ago. I stopped sputtering and started to laugh. Two of them floated down from the sky like bright pennies thrown in a pond. All three of those first-stage boosters were coming back down. If all goes well, Starman and the Tesla will go into orbit around the sun as the day winds down at Cape Canaveral.īut before the rest of the journalists and I could head back to our hotels, there was one more step. Starman’s next step, a 5-hour cruise through the intense zones of radiation that surround Earth, is less enviable – the Van Allen belt will be dangerous for the rocket’s second stage and the car inside. As I watched it blast off, it was hard not to envy Starman and his position atop the explosion. This first launch of the Falcon Heavy carried SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster as its test cargo, with a dummy nicknamed Starman in the seat. It’s a step toward Elon Musk’s dream of colonising Mars. The firm is breaking into a market that has traditionally been dominated by governments, proving its power to carry heavy payloads far from home. With this rocket, SpaceX is changing the game. It was because of the enormity of it all. I realised I’d been crying – not because of the rocket’s importance or even because it was my first time seeing a rocket launch up close. Once it was clear the rocket was not going to blow up, the crowd began to cheer it on. The thunder subsided and the birds slowly reclaimed the air. My eyes stung as the rocket lumbered off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and headed toward space. Read more: Elon Musk’s new plans for a moon base and a Mars mission by 2022 Falcon Heavy took to the air, flame shooting from its boosters, not looking like a toy anymore. When the exhaust from the engines began to pour from the launch pad, the crowd hushed in anticipation. I kept an eye on the massive countdown clock in front of me. Across the water sat Falcon Heavy, looking like a toy model from so far away. I walked across a grassy ridge to stake out a spot near the Turning Basin to watch the launch. It seemed like the Falcon was going to fly. I took a walk to ease the tension and returned to the press area to find that the fueling had begun. But as the afternoon dragged on, I wondered if the flight would be scrubbed. I had travelled to Florida to see my first rocket launch in person. The only other launch vehicle that could lift as much as Falcon Heavy was the Saturn V, which delivered astronauts to the moon but hasn’t been in use since 1973. Put simply, it’s the biggest and most powerful rocket on the market. It’s capable of putting 63,800 kilograms into low Earth orbit – that’s more than a seventh the mass of the entire International Space Station – or bringing 16,800 kilograms to Mars.
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