“According to China’s monitoring, the upper stage of the Chang’e-5 mission rocket has fallen through the Earth’s atmosphere in a safe manner and burnt up completely,” Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said during a press conference in February after trackers had changed the identity of the rocket. Given the flight profile of the Chang’e 5-T1 mission and the tracking of the mystery object, astronomers are fairly certain that a chunk of the Long March 3C rocket has remained in an extremely elongated orbit around Earth ever since, only to find its way to the far side of the Moon.Ĭhina tried to deny that the rocket belonged to the country’s space program, claiming that the rocket actually returned to our planet and fell into the atmosphere. That mission, launched on a Chinese Long March 3C rocket, sent a spacecraft looping around the Moon in an attempt to see if China could send a vehicle to the Moon and then bring it back to Earth. But after careful analysis, various groups of space trackers confirmed that the rocket was likely leftover from the launch of China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission - a flight that launched in 2014 to test out technology needed to bring samples back from the Moon. Originally, space trackers thought it was a leftover piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that had launched a weather satellite back in 2015.
Finding its way to the lunar surface by accident
0 kommentar(er)
