Astronomer who claimed that a piece of one of Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 booster rockets was going to slam into the moon in March admits that he made a mistake.
Falcon 9 was designed as well as manufactured by SpaceX in the United States.
He further mentioned that the hunk of space junk belonged to a Chinese rocket.
On March 4, 2022, Bill Gray, set the astronomy world abuzz by making a very specific prediction about a moon impact.
Gray slightly adjusted his calculations to put the impact a few kilometres away from the original impact spot but now he thinks that the long cylinder, spinning slowly is not part of a Space Exploration Technologies Corporation booster, instead it belongs to a Chinese rocket sent to the moon in October 2014.
Of Project Pluto, Gray, in a revised blog post at the weekend, which supplies software to amateur and professional astronomers, wrote that he now knows that this object is not actually the SpaceX booster, it was a misidentification by him.
In a fresh post entitled “Corrected identification of object about to hit the moon,” he has written that back in March 2015, he misidentified this object as 2015-007B, which was the second stage of the DSCOVR spacecraft. He now has good proof that it is actually 2014-065B, the booster for the Chang’e 5-T1 lunar mission.
If it was not a part of Elon’s rocket, where did that end up?
Gray said that he wishes he had a good answer, but he strongly suspects that no one really does. He doesn’t think that SpaceX knows because if they knew, they could have raised their hand in the last couple of weeks and said that that was not their rocket stage hitting the moon.
Gray said that his best guess is the booster following the DSCVR weather satellite launched by the Falcon 9 on its long journey into deep space, but which is now in all likelihood in an orbit around the sun.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard and Smithsonian, used his data and came to the same conclusion. McDowell said that to the Chinese rocket a radio from LuxSpace was attached which tracked the data of their package.
Gray and McDowell both add a warning.
Gray, in one of his new findings said that in a sense, this remains circumstantial evidence. He also added that he would regard it as fairly convincing evidence, one where the jury would file out of the courtroom and come back in a few minutes with a conviction.
McDowell said that the new data means that he can be 90% sure it’s a Chinese rocket part, but not 100%.
The estimate date for the piece of space junk hitting the moon is still March 4.
