Moon: crashing rocket will create new crater – here's what we should worry about

By David Rothery, Professor of Planetary Geosciences, The Open University

It’s not often that the sudden appearance of a new impact crater on the Moon can be predicted, but it’s going to happen on March 4, when a derelict SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will crash into it.

The rocket launched in 2015, carrying Nasa’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) probe into a position 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth, facing the Sun. But the expended upper stage of the rocket had insufficient speed to escape into an independent orbit around the Sun, and was abandoned without an option to steer back…

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