Will SpaceX be on the Moon?
As of March 4th, 2022, only a few programs have landed something on the moon. Those being NASA, JAXA, ESA, ISRO, ISA, SSP, Roscosmos, CNSA, and SpaceX. That is right. On March 4th, 2022, SpaceX will reach the surface of the moon. This isn’t a planned mission though. That is scheduled to be in 2025. Instead, the actual thing that will hit the moon is the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched in February 2015.
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| SpaceX Launch Carrying DSCOVR |
The rocket that will crash into the moon launched the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), which helps to study our planet and the space weather environment from the Earth-sun Lagrange Point 1, a spot that is nearly 930,000 miles away. Typically at the time, upper stages of Falcon 9 rockets burn upon entry into the atmosphere (Now they land vertically on the launchpads for reuse). However, because the upper stage was very high above from the atmosphere to launch DSCOVR on the right trajectory, it didn’t have enough fuel to make its return to Earth, and has since been cruising through the Earth-moon system for seven years.
The upper stage will crash on the moon on March 4th 4:25 a.m. PST. However, it will crash on the moon’s farside, and since the moon is tidally locked to the Earth, we won’t be able to see the crash. But NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and India’s Chandrayaan 2 will observe and study the resulting crater.
The resulting impact of the crash will blast large amounts of ice water into the atmosphere, and the impact could reveal new information about the moon.
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