A certain piece of space debris that appears to be on a collision course with the Moon and is expected to crash into Earth's only natural satellite next month may not be the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket stage after all, as it was previously believed.
This development was announced by Bill Gray, the creator of the Guide astrometry software used by astronomers to track near-Earth objects, and the person who, back in 2015, identified the object in question (temporary name – WE0913A) as the second stage of a SpaceX rocket that propelled the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) into space that year.
"Short version: back in 2015, I (mis)identified this object as 2015-007B, the second stage of the DSCOVR spacecraft. We now have good evidence that it is actually 2014-065B, the booster for the Chang'e 5-T1 lunar mission", Gray wrote on his website.
Gray reviewed his original conclusions after Jon Giorgini from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab contacted him and pointed out that their Horizon system "showed that the DSCOVR spacecraft's trajectory did not go particularly close to the moon", so "it would be a little strange if the second stage went right past the moon", as Gray suggested back in 2015, while DSCOVR “was in another part of the sky".
Now, Gray believes that the object in question is the booster for the Chang'e 5-T1 mission that was launched in 2014 on a Long March 3C rocket, though he described the evidence he provided in support of this theory as "circumstantial", albeit "fairly convincing".
"So I am persuaded that the object about to hit the moon on 2022 Mar 4 at 12:25 UTC is actually the Chang'e 5-T1 rocket stage," he surmised.