Part of a SpaceX rocket, about the size of a school bus, is believed to have collided with the moon, independent scientists said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The rocket carried two lunar landers into space earlier this year, one for NASA and another from a Japanese company. After the lunar landers separated from SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket, the team sought to maneuver the expended rocket away from the moon, in line with best practices.<\/p>\n
However, \u201ca mixture of solar activity and gravity forces\u201d pushed the spacecraft\u2019s trajectory toward the lunar surface, said Julianna Scheiman, director of human spaceflight and NASA science at SpaceX, at a Monday news conference<\/a>.<\/p>\n Independent astronomers combing through public NASA data first discovered the rocket was on a collision course with the moon, NASA said<\/a>. The agency\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Ca\u00f1ada Flintridge confirmed the calculations, determining the rocket had a \u201c100% chance of impacting the Moon.\u201d<\/p>\n The collision of the rocket\u2019s second stage \u2014 about 12 feet wide and 45 feet long \u2014 was expected to create a 60-foot-wide crater. While the rocket\u2019s larger and reusable first stage is responsible for carrying payloads out of the thick atmosphere the smaller second stage places payloads in their final orbits.<\/p>\n SpaceX typically lands its first stages on barges in the ocean and lets its second stages burn up in the atmosphere; however, carrying the lunar landers into a trajectory for the moon meant the second stage was traveling too fast to turn it around and bring it back to Earth. <\/p>\n The impact was too small to see with the naked eye or amateur telescopes, but \u2014 to the excitement of many scientists \u2014 NASA said it would attempt to observe the collision with ground telescopes at its Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and with its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the moon since 2009.<\/p>\n NASA did not immediately confirm whether it had spotted the collision, but did release a statement Wednesday.<\/p>\n \u201cThis rare occurrence has decades of history, going back to the Apollo era, when NASA intentionally crashed spent stages into the Moon for science and seismic research,\u201d NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote in a social media post<\/a>. \u201cThe reality is that meteoroids strike the lunar surface hourly, with impacts comparable to this upper stage occurring roughly every six days.\u201d<\/p>\n