SpaceX won a contract last year to build NASA a lander that will help bring humans back to the moon.
While that mission is still a few years away, SpaceX will be on the moon much sooner than that, in just over one month.
A Falcon 9 second stage booster is on track to collide with the moon on March 4, 2022.
The booster launched in 2015, helping to get a satellite into deep space. It ran out of fuel shortly thereafter, and has been on a chaotic orbit for the past seven years.
But according to Bill Gray, who has been tracking the booster on his Project Pluto blog, that chaotic orbit will end when it unintentionally hits the moon in early March.
Gray estimates the impact will take place on the far side of the moon, with the four-ton booster arriving at a speed of 2.58km per second.
The estimate was confirmed by Jonathan McDowell on Twitter, an astronomer from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, noting that it is ” interesting, but not a big deal.”
For those asking: yes, an old Falcon 9 second stage left in high orbit in 2015 is going to hit the moon on March 4. It's interesting, but not a big deal.
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) January 25, 2022
Its exact time and point of impact is continuously being calculated and adjusted by Gray and others, but wherever it ends up being, the impact likely won’t be visible from Earth.
