UArizona Students Confirm Errant Rocket’s Chinese Origins and Track Lunar Collision Course
TUCSON, Ariz. (University of Arizona PR) — The presumed SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster that’s on a course to hit the moon March 4 is actually a Chinese booster from a rocket launch in 2014, a University of Arizona team has confirmed.
UArizona students in the university’s Space Domain Awareness lab at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory have had their eyes on the piece of space junk for weeks as they studied its rotation. They have been gathering other data as well, which they used to confirm its Chinese origin.
“We took a spectrum (which can reveal the material makeup of an object) and compared it with Chinese and SpaceX rockets of similar types, and it matches the Chinese rocket,” said UArizona associate professor Vishnu Reddy, who co-leads the Space Domain Awareness lab with ngineering professor Roberto Furfaro. “This is the best match, and we have the best possible evidence at this point.”
Reddy and his students are providing observations to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to help pinpoint the location of the booster’s upcoming impact on the moon, which could be imaged and verified by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
They estimate that it will hit somewhere in or near the Hertzsprung crater on the moon’s far side. UArizona is the only public university that has a dedicated academic program for space domain awareness. UArizona’s space science program was ranked No. 2 among public U.S. universities and No. 10 in the world in U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 Best Global Universities rankings.
Based on its path through the sky, the booster was initially thought to be a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster from a 2015 launch, with a trajectory that put it on a path to hit the moon. The unintentional impact of space junk on the moon is uncommon. But the rocket is now believed to be a booster for the Chang’e 5-T1, launched in 2014 as part of the Chinese space agency’s lunar exploration program.
Using the RAPTORS system, a telescope atop the Kuiper Space Sciences building on campus, UArizona students took observations on the nights of Jan. 21 and Feb. 7, the latter of which was the last time the rocket would be visible before it hits the moon in March.
“I am astounded that we can tell the difference between the two rocket body options – SpaceX versus Chinese – and confirm which one will impact the moon with the data we have. The differences we see are primarily due to type of paint used by SpaceX and the Chinese,” said Adam Battle, a graduate student studying planetary science. Battle has worked at the Space Domain Awareness lab since 2018 and focuses on spectroscopy, which helped confirm the booster’s origins. An object’s spectrum can also reveal the effects of space weathering.
“We don’t often get a chance to track something we know is going to hit the moon ahead of time,” said Tanner Campbell, an aerospace and mechanical engineering graduate student who has worked with Reddy since 2017. “There is particular interest in seeing how impacts produce craters. It’s also interesting from an orbital prediction perspective, because it’s traveling between the Earth and moon unpropelled. It’s just an inert rocket body tossed around by its own energy and by solar radiation pressure, so we can evaluate our models and see how good our predictions are.”
Campbell focused on photometry of the object, meaning he determined how fast it spins. Rocket bodies have a distinct pattern of brightness that makes them easily identifiable.
This booster is just one of many pieces of space junk that the UArizona team and others around the world are tracking. There are roughly 3,500 active satellites orbiting Earth, and another 20,000 pieces of debris or space junk, according to Reddy. There is significantly less space debris surrounding the moon, however.
“While this isn’t the most detrimental impact, the idea of so many objects in space with unknown orbits and identities is worrying,” said Grace Halferty, an undergraduate student double majoring in mechanical engineering and biology. She has, since September 2018, been studying SpaceX’s Starlink satellites and their effect on ground-based astronomy. “We need better space traffic management.”
“There are only a handful of objects in lunar orbit,” Reddy said, “but I hope this event sheds light on the growing problem of space junk. This science community is concerned about the growing pollution.”
The UArizona team has also tracked and identified many other humanmade objects as they travel across the sky.
- In 2018, the UArizona team used a $1,500 optical sensor they built in four months to track the defunct Chinese space station Tiangong-1 before it fell into the sea on March 31.
- In 2020, the team tracked a piece of an Atlas rocket that launched Surveyor 2 in 1966. Using spectroscopy, the team confirmed that it was what’s called the “Centaur upper stage” – the part of the rocket that provides the in-space thrust to set the spacecraft on a precise trajectory toward the moon.
- In 2021, the team tracked the 22-ton Long March 5B rocket that launched China’s Tianhe space station module into Earth’s orbit before the rocket fell to Earth on May 8.
22 responses to “UArizona Students Confirm Errant Rocket’s Chinese Origins and Track Lunar Collision Course”
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It is very sad that when this story broke everything immediately starting demonizing Elon Musk and SpaceX, especially folks from ESA. And now, after it turns out to be Chinese none of the after apologize for doing so.
sorry I did not catch all the demonizing. after all it was only going to hit the Moon. the only working devices on the lunar surface are chinese 🙂
As President Obama stated in his “Kennedy moment” – been there, did that”
in my view the lunar goal is about the dumbest goal that one could pick. There is next to no interest in the US of spending any money on developing lunar resources or anything along those lines. the vehicle they are building to do it SLS/Orion /HLS are expensive and badly sized. its likely that HLS will costs between 2-3 billion dollars a flight so with SLS/Orion thats near r5 billion.
the asteroid goal made more sense.
You mean NASA bringing a 500 ton rock to lunar orbit so the NASA astronauts could play on it?
yeah that. it needed to be a bit moresophisticated in terms of sampling. but plans were around to use the basic hardware with remote “gathers” to survey an asteroid with massive sample diversity you folks are fooling yourselves thinking that there is any real push for any off world resource development. there is no economic reason to do it
There is no interest in it by NASA, ESA, or JAXA because being dominated by scientists they have no interest in space settlement. Settling space is going to be driven by private ventures not government ones.
no one has any interest passed the talking stage because there is no economic reason to do it. private companies wont spend money to keep people at a place where they are non productive. this is the thing that Musk spreads all the time and its babble how many people do you think would be in Alaska with no oil?
There were lots of folks in Alaska before the oil. Some to find work, some to find gold or fish, some to just get away from life in the lower 48. The real question is how many folks will have the money and desire to leave the Earth and its politics. The problem is that folks are still thinking in terms of O’Neill colonies and Mars Direct instead of practical approaches to space settlement, and the business models to support settlement.
the point is there is no business model for space settlements. none zero. its all “Elon makes money and invest it in Mars and we go there ” that wont work
There are business models that will work if you understand marketing, economics and finance. But most engineers don’t which is why nothing ever came of O’Neill’s habitats over the decades and space advocates groups like the NSS, Mars Society and the Space Frontier Foundation waste most of their time lobbying Congress for space settlement.
The insight needed to be able to design business models for space settlement is understanding what Wroe Anderson wrote about the function of business enterprises in society. The problem is that the majority of space settlement advocates don’t understand business strategy and are still stuck on the outdated paradigm of European Colonial exploitation and export of natural resources which will not work in space.
I dont agree, and I think I understand marketing etc pretty well. We had a steak dinner last night at Longhorn Steakhouse and when the waitress saw the credit card (in the name of the farm) she looked at me and said “Fiddlers Green” our beef comes from a place named that…and my 7 year old said “that will be my farm one day “
Does it bother you that Elon doesnt seem to see the model you mention either?
That is not marketing in terms of how the academic field of marketing defines, in the the field it is called promotional and it only takes up couple of chapters out of a marketing textbook. It is a mistake that most non-marketers make and I generally spend the first two lectures re-educating business students on what marketing is and its theoretical foundations in economics and the behavioral sciences. As Wroe Alderson defined it several decades ago, marketing is the societal function of transforming limited resources to meet unlimited needs, what we call today a business model.
Also Elon Musk plans have glimmers of it if you know what you are looking for with Starlink being a prime example of leveraging SpaceX’s strengths to link directly to a large consumer market for revenue generation, skipping multiple intermediaries.
Tom. We can sometimes sit down and talk about success and failure of starting business 🙂 I would be surprised if I start another one in my life; you never know; but right now I have other than the farm, 3 and 1/2 (the boat) that we run and make money 🙂 and made money through COVID.
ANYWAY I dont see how you market Mars into existance with no product 🙂 to sustain the economy RGO
I agree as there are no existing business models for Mars since the path to Mars, in terms of business models, goes through the Moon. That is what Dr. Zubrin always refused to see.
Lunar industrialization, which will be mostly done robotically from Earth, will need to be first. And Starship, in terms of the cargo version, will enable early lunar industrialization.
Lunar industrialization will certainly use robotics – plenty of TeslaBots, some of them wearing EVA suits. But it will also require a great many people on-site too.
Yes, doing the jobs that robots are not suitable for.
Lunar industrialization is at least a decade maybe two away…I agree it will be with a minimal human staff mostly transitory and if it works starship will help make it happen. but its 10-20 years away and I dont see why it precursors Mars settlement.
and there are a lot of “ifs” there. I dont see lunar industrialization until there is some product in LEO that requires humans…
Lunar industrialization will function to support the communities located on the Moon, not LEO. It will also enable the building of the 1G mobile space communities that will be needed to enable the development of sustainable space communities on Mars and throughout the Solar System. Mars is too far, and Starship far too small, to transport the resources needed to develop sustainable communities on Mars. Yes, it is a decade or more away because everyone is chasing lunar water, rather than lunar ore deposits.
its more basic than that with me. I dont see what starts deelopment of any lunar “resource” when there is no established need
Space already has its real word product that makes a profit. Information. Information gathering, information repeating and relay. I don’t think you’re going to get a product with a historical analog to say sugar until you put a lot of humans in place already. Still to this day the only analog to sugar that space might offer to create geometric growth off planet is energy. Gerard O’Neil had good foresight for a product that would link Earth’s economy to space, but getting between here and there is a real unknown. Europe had Mexican gold to steal, and then locals to enslave and mines to run to bridge the gap from Columbus to sugar plantations. We’ll need a serious peace dividend to bridge the gap from now to energy infrastructure that will truly augment energy production on the planet.
No, energy is not going to be the product that makes space business happen. That is exactly the European Colonial Paradigm. Energy will be needed of course for settlements in Space, but it would be a direct export product. Elon Musk who owns both a solar energy company and rocket launch company is right in his assessment of SBSP.
Starlink is indeed a good example of a “space product” focused on consumers markets, one they bypasses both the intermediary communication companies and government funding.