Piece of SpaceX rocket believed to have crashed into the moon

Posted by thm 1 day ago

269Original

Comments

Comment by rich_sasha 1 day ago

SpaceX in a nutshell: simultaneously going to the moon and crashing.

Comment by auspiv 1 day ago

which would make it the 37th+ spacecraft to hit the moon

(most S-IVB rocket stages and Lunar Module ascent stages impacted the Moon - not tracked individually on that page)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spacecraft_that_impac...

Comment by jrmg 1 day ago

Will we be able to get pictures of this?

I presume that if the answer is ‘yes’ we will do so, and I’d like to see some!

Comment by simondotau 1 day ago

The answer is no. Hubble's visible-light resolution is about 0.05 arcseconds, which translates to 90 metres per pixel, far too large to make out anything that's "merely" bus sized. An imager would need to in orbit around the moon to have any reasonable chance.

It seems like they're hoping to detect the plume of dust caused by the collision, however.

Comment by NetMageSCW 1 day ago

The crater created by the impact with the dust throw around it will be bigger.

Comment by garaetjjte 1 day ago

...but there's a imager in orbit around the moon, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Comment by dylan604 1 day ago

Multiple lunar orbiters will be passing overhead at some point. They will produce images of the after effects that can be used in a before/after comparison. But the crash will(was??) not be televised or live streamed which is probably more along what you are asking.