A blinking line popped up on his screen, highlighted in red: “IMPACT,” written in all caps. In January, astronomer Bill Gray ran a computer program that plotted its trajectory. The object is designated WE0913A and was tracked intermittently since it was first spotted in 2015 during surveys designed to look for potentially hazardous asteroids. “That means making sure we do the right things-we figure out where our rockets are going and make sure we don’t just start throwing stuff on the moon for the heck of it.” So what is this thing that hit the moon? “We need to make sure that we go to space responsibly,” says Michelle Hanlon, a space lawyer at the University of Mississippi and the founder of the nonprofit For All Moonkind, which seeks to preserve lunar heritage sites. And even if this particular collision isn’t a big deal, the next one could be.
Private companies are joining the handful of nations that have already sent hardware to the moon. Lunar exploration is ramping up, with humans once again setting their sights on establishing moon bases either on the surface or in orbit. And maybe alien mutants grown from the human poop left there,” says astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics. “It’s not a big deal at the current level of occupation of the moon, which is currently population: robots, a couple of dozen humans, zero. Regardless of where it came from, the rocket’s impact did not damage anything other than the lunar surface.
Astronomers believe the derelict rocket stage came from China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission that launched in 2014, but experts are not completely certain.
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