"We'll need (and I am confident will get) more observations in early February to refine the prediction that will bring the uncertainty down greatly," he added.īecause it will occur on the moon's farside, the impact won't be visible from Earth. "At a guess, the above prediction may be wrong by a degree or two minutes from the predicted time," Gray wrote in a blog post about the coming impact, citing the difficulty of modeling precisely how sunlight pressure moves a tumbling, cylindrical object such as a rocket stage. The impact will occur on the lunar farside, at about 4.93 degrees north latitude and 233.20 degrees east longitude. Gray, using data gathered by a variety of fellow observers, calculated that the stage will crash into the moon on March 4 at 7:25 a.m. So it's been cruising through the Earth-moon system on a long and looping orbit for nearly seven years. The upper stage was so high after sending DSCOVR on its way, however, that it didn't have enough fuel to return to its home planet, Berger wrote. But the company had yet to pull off a first-stage touchdown at the time of the DSCOVR launch the first such success came in December 2015.) (SpaceX famously lands and reuses the first stages of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. SpaceX usually disposes of Falcon 9 upper stages after launch by sending them back into Earth's atmosphere for a fiery death.
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