On March 4, 2022, not the stage of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle will fall on the far side of the Moon, but the Chinese Long March 3C, which sent the Chang'e-5T1 automatic lunar station into orbit in October 2014, which was used to test the descent module returning to Earth. This was announced by amateur astronomer Bill Gray, who tracks space debris, asteroids and other objects nearth and was the first to announce the upcoming collision of a piece of earth technology with the Moon.
Bill Gray, who uses Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, acknowledged the error on his website. He explained that back in 2015, he and other observers spotted an unidentified object in the sky and gave it the temporary designation WE0913A. Further observations indicated that the object was likely man-made, and soon the second stage of the rocket used to launch the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, mission in 2015 became the prime candidate. “I thought it was either DSCOVR or some kind of hardware related to it,” Gray wrote. “Further observations, however, confirmed that WE0913A passed by the Moon two days after the launch of DSCOVR, and other observers concluded that the identification of the current object with that stage was erroneous.” The mistake was first pointed out by engineer John Giorgini of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Soon another candidate was found - the Chinese Chang'e-5T1, launched in October 2014 on a Long March 3C rocket as a preliminary test of a mission to return lunar samples. The launch time and lunar trajectory almost exactly match the orbit of an object that will collide with the Moon in March.
Earlier, the news that the Falcon 9 rocket stage (as it was then believed) would fall on the moon on March 4 caused a strong reaction around the world. SpaceX has been criticized by the media for failing to properly dispose of its second stage rocket after the launch of the DSCOVR mission. Even the European Space Agency noted that, unlike Elon Musk's company, it always takes care to save enough fuel to launch spent rocket stages into stable orbits around the Sun.
The object that should fall on the moon, as I wrote, was photographed from Earth by the founder of the Virtual Telescope Project, Gianluca Masi, using the 43-centimeter PlaneWave telescope in Rome, which he controlled remotely.
bbabo.Net