Man-made space debris crashed into the far side of the moon last year, initially surprising scientists. After some astronomical detective work, new research says it’s most likely a Chinese launch vehicle with an unknown object attached.

On March 4, 2022, a mysterious object known as WE0913A crashed into the Moon’s surface, leaving behind a pair of unusually shaped craters. Although it was initially suspected to be part of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, evidence later emerged that it was part of the Chang’e 5-T1 lunar mission. However, China denied any involvement.

Now scientists from the University of Arizona, California Institute of Technology, the Pluto Project and the Planetary Sciences Institute hope to solve this mystery. They tracked the object’s orbit using ground-based telescopic observations and concluded that WE0913A was part of the fuselage of the Chinese Long March rocket of the Chang’e 5-T1 mission launched in 2014.

Additionally, they found evidence that the abandoned rocket stage likely carried “an unknown overhead.”

The team made this claim with two lines of evidence. First, the object did not appear to wobble as it fell onto the Moon’s surface, but rather rotated in a fairly steady state of rolling. They say this shows that the rocket’s stage is balanced by a fairly large counterweight against two engines weighing 544 kilograms each.

“What has been in space for so long is exposed to the gravitational forces of the Earth and the Moon, as well as sunlight. So you’d expect it to wobble a bit, especially considering that the rocket body is a large, hollow shell with a heavy engine on one side. But the first time the study started “But it was changing very steadily from end to end,” Tanner Campbell, author of the study and a doctoral student in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Arizona, said in a statement.

“We know that there was an instrument panel mounted on the top of the launch vehicle, but they weighed only about 27 kilograms. We performed a torque balance analysis that showed that this much weight could move the rocket’s center of gravity by a few centimeters, which was not enough to explain the rocket’s stable spin.” “It makes us think that something should have been done sooner,” he added.

Second, the researchers were also struck by strange overlapping craters, consisting of an eastern crater about 18 meters (59 feet) in diameter and a western crater about 16 meters (16 meters) in diameter.

“This is the first time we’ve seen a double crater,” Campbell explained. “We know that in the case of Chang’e 5 T1, the impact was almost straight down, and you would need two bodies approximately equally spaced apart to get these two craters that are roughly the same size.”

As for the undisclosed payload, Campbell and the team aren’t expecting any response.

“Obviously we have no idea what that could be; maybe it could be some kind of extra support structure, extra hardware, or something else,” he said. “I guess we’ll never know.” Source