Whatever hit the Moon in March, it left this weird double crater When space junk crashed into the Moon earlier this year, it made not one but two craters on the lunar surface, judging from images revealed by NASA on Friday. Astronomers predicted a mysterious object would hit the Moon on March 4 after tracking the debris for months. The object was large, and believed to be a spent rocket …
There would be pretty much nothing left but melting dust to rebound! The moon's escape velocity is over 2km/s. The kinetic energy available at impact is more than enough to completely vaporise anything that smashes into the moon though some it lost into digging the crater but you can see the flashes from meteor impacts on the earth facing side of the moon from time to time. Earth's atmosphere slows things down so small meteors or larger grazing ones sometimes survive.
More fun asto stuff - 12 instrument modes sorted - 5 to go https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html
So….. 128 Linguine, or thereabouts .. where are the other 5 bits
It’s hard enough to comprehend the implied relativistic anomaly of a single Alibaba delivery creating two (count them) craters when you quote ridiculous units of measurement.. I mean, FFS!
(Barbarella, Duran Duran .. I’m here all week, try the veal)
In the article it is said that the rogue rocket was moving "end over end"...so it is quite possible that this was still happening as it hit the Moon (which has no atmosphere to slow down any such movements).
So, the double crater could just be from one end hitting the surface first and millisconds later the other end also landed, creating the second crater.
> one end hitting the surface first and millisconds later the other end also landed
That only works if the rocket was boomerang-shaped to start with: There is no way a straight object can land (both) ends first, and rockets tend to be straight cylinders.
The only valid explanation is that two heavy objects struck (not necessarily at the same time) ground. Which, as the article said, would tend to rule out a rocket stage, which is one heavy engine on one end and a flimsy empty sheet metal structure for all the rest.
All we apparently know is that China dunnit, but what exactly remains to be determined...
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So, the double crater could just be from one end hitting the surface first and millisconds later the other end also landed, creating the second crater.
Likely the lighter top end hitting first with still the full mass of the rocket stage behind the impact creating the first crater. Then the body collapsing or breaking and the heavier motor end hitting the surface a short distance away creating the second.
Or it's from some transdimensional being getting bored watching a game of Brockian Ultra-Cricket and flicking peanuts into wormholes.
This is interesting possibility. I tried to find estimates of impact rate but could not find anything simple. Good place to start seems to be NASA Lunar Impact Monitoring Program and then perhaps NELIOTA Project: first seems not to have publications yet but second does (but I did not read it).
My uninformed guess then is that impact rate is so low that chance of two unrelated impacts in 82 day period (between Feb 28 2022, May 21 2022) causing overlapping crater is within epsilon of zero.
sorry, no. That sort of thig could only happen in the kind of low-velocity impact we#re familar with in everyday life, but the imct velocity involved would have turned any single object into a combination of hot metal mist and small chunks of debris on initial impact. It will definitely have been two massy objects t have formed two craters.
Maybe it was two distinct objects, or one object that had broken up and the two halves separated during descent. The fact that the two craters overlap would indicate that the two objects were flying in fairly close formation, one slightly ahead of the other. If, as surmised, they were the parts of a booster launched in 2014, they would have separated fairly significantly in the intervening 8 odd years, due to perturbations from local gravitational variations, or even minor collisions along the way.
"If not, perhaps there was a fuel explosion?"
Highly unlikely. Even if the fuel is RP-1, the oxidizer would have been cryogenic for a first stage booster and, unless it got to the moon very quickly, would have boiled off. There wouldn't be anything left to go boom. Hypergolic fuels may last long enough. I've never worked on a mission involving storable propellants of a long duration (over a couple of days). Thermal management in space is a PIA.
Couple of options-
1) Future investigations reveal objects of unknown construction at the bottom of each crater. Deeper study uncovers a 'black box'. After much computation, a translation is produced. The last recording said-
"We're breaking up.. We're going in" followed by brief sounds of collision. More worringly, the recording revealed an encoded overlay in a seperate language stating that "All your base are belong to us!
As the study also uncovers evidence that the wrecked ship contained materials likely to be used to establish an outpost, this will be troubling. The recorder evidence plus outpost/base kit may indicate colonisation attempts by two parties in conflict.
2) The Clangers have discovered YouTube and Tannerite. They then discovered that the distance between their target and their magazine was too small for the excessively large charge they were shooting at. This suggests an intelligence level equivalent of humans, as both species frequently fail to consider the physics and safety implications of shooting large charges in exchange for views, and shrapnel.
This should tell us about the angle of impact, as high energy craters tend to be round even when the impact is at very oblique angles. An object with a mass at each end, or a rocket booster engine instantaneously separated from its tank section. 16 metres base, simple geometry am very amused and nostalgic how the articles gives us the dimensions in yards.
Anyone here go access to iSALE and a spare week to set up a sim?
Good thought. I think some of the 'twin craters' on the moon are theorized to have been caused by shallow-angle impacts. But this object came in at about 15 degrees from vertical (quite well-determined from our knowledge of its trajectory). So, not at all a shallow impact.
I'm the Bill Gray mentioned in the article. But my only connection to the Planetary Society is that I wrote a couple of articles for them, quite a while back. (One of which, coincidentally, was about Chang'e 2 and its flyby of the asteroid Toutatis, which involved similar sleuthing to figure out what China was up to. This would all be much simpler if the China National Space Agency would just tell us what they were doing, the way ESA and NASA almost always do. But I'll admit that it's more fun when CSNA leaves us little puzzles like this to figure out.)
Do we know that the entire payload was only a single satellite which was successfully deployed?
If there was a second satellite which failed to deploy would that leave the craft with a large enough "dumbell" weight distribution? How the mechanics of such a situation would stack up depends on lots of impact unknowns but ...
"Bill Gray, a developer building software for professional astronomers, who first predicted the impact"
Bill, experts like you are meant to stay above the line. We don't like people who know what they are talking about below the line, it just makes the rest of us look bad.
The prevailing theory below the line so far is the crater was created by Clangers, but like you I disagree. Personally I suspect the Soup Dragon, but I'm willing to call the Astronomer Hotline.
El Reg readers could crowdfund an unpersoned moonshot - Red Dwarf - to find out exactly what it is, check for clangers and WWII bombers and bring back enough moondust to turn a profit. We have a name for our ship and an excellent theme tune. The rest should be easy.
Then we send Red Dwarf II to Mars.
One odd impact crater caused by Chinese space junk. For decades humanity has been trashing up space and there are increasing amounts of junk in orbit. The moon already has a notable amount of left junk, and Mars is now being trashed up as well. And NOBODY seems to care. Just like here on Earth. Nobody really cares unless there is negative political impact, or a nasty financial one. And those who do believe we should be picking up after ourselves are just viewed as 'enviro-lefty-kooks'.
So I see one double impact crater. Does it really matter? Nobody apparently gives a toss.
...of Chinese tat to the moon.
It arrived late and in amazingly fucked condition...Ali Express called it a success and are now shipping to the moon.
In other news, the renowned cardboard packaging crash test lab, Hermes, have shown great interest in the process and are planning an astronaut delivery person training programme which involves kicking other peoples packages up and down an empty space in Zero G. Packages will be selected at random and the astronauts will mostly be mums who can deliver to the moon during a school run in a specially modified Ford Galaxy people carrier complete with the Deluxe package of 4 scuffed alloy rims, a cracked rear bumper and at least one door a different colour to the rest of the craft. The rear passenger foot wells will be filled with a regulation amount of biscuit crumbs, crisps and McDonalds chips.
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