Little is known about objects that pass within 70,000 kilometers of the Moon's surface, an area known as the “cone of shame.”
On 4 March, a discarded rocket booster will slam into Hertzsprung Crater on the far side of the Moon—humanity’s first known piece of litter to unintentionally reach the lunar surface. Skywatchers originally thought the booster was part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched in 2015. But now they say it is part of a Chinese Long March 3C rocket that blasted off in 2014.
Reddy says there are probably fewer than 200 large pieces of space junk around the Moon, although nobody knows for sure. In the next 5 years, that number could increase significantly, with roughly 50 planned missions from the United States, China, Russia, other countries, and private companies targeting the lunar surface or its orbital space.Most fragments that fall out of Earth’s orbit burn up in the atmosphere on re-entry.
The complex gravitational dance between Earth, the Moon, and the Sun makes tracking lunar space junk hard. Objects can spiral through chaotic and difficult-to-predict pathways as they get tugged by the Moon or Earth. “A small difference in the approach direction makes a large difference in where it ends up,” McDowell says.The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory last week awarded Reddy and his colleagues $7.5 million to come up with better ways to track lunar space junk.
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