Rocket to impact dark side of the moon in March is not SpaceX's space junk: It's China's
Space junk is still expected to impact the moon on March 4, but what will hit apparently isn't part of a SpaceX rocket launched seven years ago. Instead, what will hit the dark side of the moon is now thought to be a rocket that helped launch a Chinese lunar mission in 2014.
Researcher Bill Gray, who last month initially projected the impact, noted on his Project Pluto website, that Jon Giorgini, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had pointed out the SpaceX rocket, which in February 2015 had taken the $340 million Deep Space Climate Observatory into space, "did not go particularly close to the moon."
"It would be a little strange," he wrote, if the second stage rocket, which was thought to be headed toward a moon impact back in 2015, "went right past the moon, while Deep Space Climate Observatory was in another part of the sky."
So, Gray dug back into his research and found "circumstantial" evidence identifying the culprit as actually a rocket from the Chinese robotic moon mission, the Chang'e 5-T1. This rocket was part of tests ahead of the 2020 Chinese probe that collected moon rocks.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rocket-impact-dark-side-moon-100134351.html
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