THE case of a mysterious UFO moon crash has now been closed, a new study has found.
Mystery had been surrounding NASA images of an unidentified spacecraft that crashed into the moon’s far side, blasting out a weird 100ft-wide double crater.
The schoolbus-sized hunk of metal, designated WE0913A by astronomers, hit the rocky satellite’s surface in the early hours of March 4, 2022.
The NASA snaps sent conspiracy theorists wild on social media, with some labelling them as proof of alien activity.
But the mysterious UFO turned out to be a Chinese rocket, Space.com reports.
The crash had not come as a surprise to astronomers as they had been tracing the rogue vehicle for weeks, but they couldn’t pinpoint its identity.
It was the first time a man-made object had crashed into the moon without being aimed there.
Scientists initially suggested it could have been the upper stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched the Earth-observing DSCOVR satellite in February 2015.
But after some more digging, a study found it was part of the Long March 3C rocket that launched the Chang’e 5-T1 mission around the moon in October 2014.
The confirmation was made by a University of Arizona team led by Tanner Campbell, a doctoral student in the UA’s Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering.
“In this paper, we present a trajectory and spectroscopic analysis using ground-based telescope observations to show conclusively that WE0913A is the Long March 3C rocket body (R/B) from the Chang’e 5-T1 mission,” the researchers wrote in a study released on Thursday in the Planetary Science Journal.
These two lines of evidence — how the object was moving and what it was made of — leave little doubt about WE0913A’s provenance, Campbell and his colleagues report.
The study also sheds more light on the distinctive crater left by the moon crash.
Researchers said they have found interesting differences after using computer simulations to compare the WE0913A’s light curve — the change in its brightness over time — with those of thousands of hypothetical space objects.
“Something that’s been in space as long as this is subjected to forces from the Earth‘s and the moon’s gravity and the light from the sun,” Campbell said in a statement.
“So you would expect it to wobble a little bit, particularly when you consider that the rocket body is a big empty shell with a heavy engine on one side.
“But this was just tumbling end-over-end, in a very stable way.”
In January 2022, astronomer Bill Gray reported that the junk was a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage launched from Florida in February 2015.
It was on a mission to deploy an Earth observation satellite called DSCOVR for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
However, after receiving a tip from a NASA scientist, he later retracted his claim and said the rocket part most likely belonged to China.
“Back in 2015, I (mis)identified this object as 2015-007B, the second stage of the DSCOVR spacecraft,” Gray, who developed the asteroid-tracking software Project Pluto, said at the time.
“We now have good evidence that it is actually 2014-065B, the booster for the Chang’e 5-T1 lunar mission.”
Chang’e 5-T1 was an experimental spacecraft that lifted off in October 2014 in preparation for the Chang’e 5 lunar mission.
The mission was part of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program that would eventually make it the third nation to touch down on the Moon after the US and Soviet Union.
But China was having none of it, claiming a few days later that the upper stage of the mission safely burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
“According to China’s monitoring, the upper stage of the Chang’e-5 mission rocket has fallen through the Earth’s atmosphere in a safe manner and burnt up completely,” Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
