The Chinese missile continues its course to collide with the moon on March 4th... Can we detect the collision from Earth?

Weather of Arabia - On March 4, 2022, humanity will witness - for the first time - a piece of space debris collides with a celestial body other than Earth without being directed at it, as a piece of a Chinese missile is heading to collide soon with the surface of the moon, so what are the effects of this collision? Can we watch it from Earth?

The rocket body is believed to be part of a rocket launched in 2014 to deliver a small Chinese spacecraft called Chang'e 5-T1 to the Moon. It is now moving under the influence of lunar gravity, and is getting closer to crashing into the moon's surface within days.

Is collision dangerous to humans or to the earth?

It is expected that the debris of the rocket will hit the surface of the moon at a speed of (9300 km / h). The impacts will be minimal, except for a small new crater that will form on the moon's surface, and the new crater will be about 20 meters (100 feet) wide.

The accident does not pose any immediate danger to humans or other spacecraft, but with at least six vehicles scheduled to reach the moon this year, there is growing concern that the lunar surface will become a dumping ground for space debris, and the effects that this will have on the environment. Lunar.

Were there previous intentional collisions with the moon's surface? How is this collision different from it?

In the past, there have been many intentional collisions with the moon’s surface, with the aim of ending missions for spacecraft that were orbiting the moon and ran out of fuel, and some of them were for planned landings on the moon but did not take place successfully, and some collisions were for scientific purposes, such as NASA’s bombing of the moon’s surface during the era of missions Apollo in the late 1960s and 1970s, with the aim of studying how seismic energy from collisions spreads across the Moon.

But never before has a piece of ancient space junk that has been roaming in space for seven years collided before veering on a collision course toward the surface of the Moon.

Can we monitor the collision from Earth?

Since the collision will occur on the side of the moon invisible from Earth, near a volcanic crater called Hertzsprung, we will not be able to observe the eruption with telescopes, and astronomers will not be able to watch the impact of the collision as it happens, but many spacecraft orbiting the moon will try to explore the event And the Indian Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Chandrayaan 2 may be positioned to monitor the impact site.

There are more than 36000 pieces of space debris around the Earth

Space junk in the area around Earth is a known problem to scientists. Since the space age began in 1957, more than 12,000 satellites have been launched orbiting Earth, and about 5,100 of them are still operational, according to the European Space Agency, but the agency estimates that there are more than 36,000. A piece of debris (greater than 10 cm) around Earth's orbit. This debris includes dead satellites, remnants of previous launches, and anti-satellite missile tests.

There is very little space debris around the moon, but scientists are concerned that this will not continue to be the case. A research team led by Vishnu Reddy, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, uses telescopes to track the positions of more than 150 objects in space that move around the moon regularly, at least 90% of which are space junk.

Vishnu and his colleagues tracked the object on its way to the moon, and analyzed how sunlight reflected off it to make sure it was made of a material similar to China's rocket booster. (The object was initially identified as a SpaceX rocket booster, but analysis showed that its characteristics did not match those of the craft.)

It is reported that the Chinese rocket booster has been wandering in space since 2014, under the influence of the Earth's gravity and the moon's gravity, until it ended up on a collision course with the moon, and Bill Gray, an astronomer in Maine, was the first to monitor the collision course, as there is no organization responsible for Tracking objects far from Earth, American space agencies track space objects that are in fixed orbits, about 35,800 km from Earth, but the Moon is approximately 400,000 km away, and therefore tracking is usually done by individual groups.