None
NL
Collision Next Week: Spent SpaceX Rocket Set To Slam Into Moon
['Tyler Durden']
ZeroHedge News
A spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage is forecast to slam into the moon near Einstein Crater early Wednesday morning, potentially producing the first impact plume observed from Earth against the lunar surface's sunlit side.
William Jo, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering, and five co-authors posted a preprint to arXiv detailing the expected lunar impact of the spent upper stage rocket.
We present a study of the expected impact dynamics and resulting possibly observable debris field.
Simulated I/F exceeds dark-sky background brightness by several orders of magnitude for the first few minutes after impact, reaching I/F = 1.27*10^-3 at the earliest resolved time (t = 5 s).
Above 10 km, peak I/F reaches 1.33*10^-5, still several orders of magnitude brighter than the dark sky.