CAPE CANAVERAL, Aug. 1 — The first known unintentional impact of human-made space debris with the Moon involved a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage that spent years wandering in a chaotic Earth-Moon orbit before slamming into the lunar far side in March 2022. The episode remains a textbook case of what happens when a rocket’s final disposal burn is simply left undone. The upper stage lifted off on February 11, 2015, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, a joint NOAA-NASA mission.
The satellite was headed for the L1 Lagrange point, a gravitationally balanced position about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, to monitor solar wind and the planet’s climate. The Falcon 9’s upper stage completed its primary job, deploying DSCOVR into the correct trajectory.
Then it should have performed a deorbit burn. It did not. The technical reality is that the booster, weighing approximately 4.4 tons, was left in a high-altitude orbit after the satellite deployment.
Without that burn, its orbit gradually became chaotic, and the Moon and the rocket eventually found themselves on a collision course.
The prediction
The collision was flagged not by NASA but by Bill Gray, an astronomer who tracks near-Earth objects. In January 2022, Gray calculated that the upper stage would intersect the Moon’s surface near the Hertzsprung crater, on the far side, at a speed of roughly 2.58 kilometres per second. The impact was not visible in real time from Earth.
But it may have kicked up a dust plume large enough to be detected by spacecraft such as NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or India’s Chandrayaan-2. For planetary scientists, that was the opportunity hidden inside a piece of orbital negligence: a fresh crater on the far side offers data on the Moon’s subsurface composition, with no drilling required.
The upper stage failed to perform that deorbit burn. That is the detail that matters, as ever with space debris — the problem is not the hardware that works, but the hardware that is left behind.
SpaceX in context
The Falcon 9 is SpaceX’s two-stage orbital workhorse, designed and manufactured by the company Elon Musk founded in 2002. Since its debut in 2010, the rocket has conducted more than 150 launches, with reusability and cost reduction as the central engineering goals. The DSCOVR launch itself was a three-way partnership between NASA, NOAA and the US Air Force.
What makes the 2022 lunar impact more than a trivia question is that it was not a navigation failure. The booster achieved its primary mission.
What it did not do was take the final, routine step of disposing of itself. As a result, a 4.4-ton piece of launch hardware became, in effect, a lunar lander of the unintended kind. Years on, the episode is a reference point for how launch providers handle upper stages at the end of their operational lives.
The Moon, it turns out, is a convenient — if drastic — destination for a wayward rocket. For now, it remains the only known case of a rocket stage making an unplanned lunar landing.
Sources
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