#Spacex falcon 9 software#

And so if you imagine throwing that at a rock at 5,000 miles an hour, it's not going to be happy,' McDowell tells the BBC. 'It's basically a four-tonne empty metal tank, with a rocket engine on the back. When the rocket’s second stage finally collides with the moon at roughly 5,771 mph, it will explode on impact. The SpaceX booster was part of the company’s first deep-space mission designed to monitor solar storms and Earth's climate, per Live Science's Ben Turner. After the booster sent the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite to a gravitationally-stable Lagrange point, the rocket’s second stage became derelict. “And it couldn’t do it because the rocket had hit the moon.”

#Spacex falcon 9 software#

“I realized that my software complained because it couldn’t project the orbit past March 4,” Gray told Timothy Bella of the Washington Post. Gray predicts the rocket will hit the far side of the moon on March 4, 2022. While the SpaceX rocket isn’t the only piece of “space junk” orbiting Earth, it could be the first documented rocket collision with the moon, according to data analyst Bill Gray who developed software that tracks near-Earth objects. This may have happened a bunch of times before, we just didn't notice.” 'Over the decades there have been maybe 50 large objects that we've totally lost track of. 'It's been dead-just following the laws of gravity,” McDowell says to Georgina Rannard for BBC.

The rocket has been pulled by the competing gravitational forces of the Earth, moon, and sun, which has made its path chaotic, says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The rocket’s second stage has been in an uncontrolled orbit ever since. The Falcon 9 booster was launched by Elon Musk's space exploration company in 2015, but after completing its mission, it didn’t have enough fuel to return to Earth. A piece of a SpaceX rocket will crash into the moon after spending nearly seven years hurtling through space, experts predict.