A Luxembourg probe will crash on the Moon, which was not planned at all
Space debris reaches the Moon this Friday, March 4, 2022: a Chinese rocket. Or, it carried a Luxembourg-designed payload.
Luxembourg probably reached the surface of the Moon this Friday, March 4, 2022. After the former USSR, the United States, Japan, Europe (ESA), China, India and Israel, c t is the turn of the small European country to reach the Moon. But unlike the other powers, this contact with the lunar soil was not at all planned at the start.
The anecdote is linked to the presence of space debris which, according to expectations, must have hit the surface of the Moon around 1:25 p.m. this Friday. The object was identified as a remnant of a Chinese rocket – which China denies. It had previously been mistakenly thought to be a piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Even if there is no definitive proof to confirm it, the clues accumulate to say that this debris is indeed the remains of the launcher of the Chang’e 5-T1 mission, emitted in 2014.
A probe attached to the last stage of the Chinese rocket
Or, as has precisely pointed out on Twitter a videographer Space enthusiast, who maintains the Closer to Space channel on YouTube, the part of the rocket which must now lie on the far side of the Moon contains a Luxembourg payload, fixed to the upper stage of the Long March 3B rocket. She was baptized Manfred Memorial Lunar Mission (4M).
This probe was the very first of a private nature to perform a lunar flyby (October 28, 2014). It was suggested by LuxSpace, a subsidiary company of OHB AG, based in Luxembourg and specialized in space systems. The 4M probe had been permanently attached to the third stage of the Chang’e 5-T1 rocket.
Since it seems very likely that this booster is indeed the debris that touches the Moon on March 4, we can therefore consider that Luxembourg will, in a certain way, also reach this star. On the other hand, it is not the first to do so by crashing a payload on the Moon. Before March 4, other man-made objects crashed on the Moon — the returned lander Beresheet, for example, crashed on the Moon in 2019. the first time that space debris crashes there without having been directed towards the Moon and that we are aware of.