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< A piece of space junk the size of a school bus is barreling straight toward the moon

A piece of space junk the size of a school bus is barreling straight toward the moon

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TAMARA KEITH, HOST:

A piece of rocket will crash into the far side of the moon next month. It's been tumbling through space out of control since 2015. NPR's Deepa Shivaram reports it's renewing a conversation on how to manage space junk.

DEEPA SHIVARAM, BYLINE: There will be a new crater on the Moon that appears in early March, and it's happening because of Elon Musk. Back in February 2015, his company SpaceX launched one of its Falcon 9 rockets. It was an uncrewed mission to put a satellite into space about a million miles away from Earth. But seven years later, part of the rocket is about to crash into the moon.

JONATHAN MCDOWELL: This is the first time that something that wasn't even aimed at the moon has ended up accidentally smashing into the moon that we know of.

SHIVARAM: That's Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer with the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian. He says the rocket piece is moving in a chaotic orbit and getting tugged around by the gravitational pulls from both the Earth and the Moon. Astronomers have predicted that on March 4, it'll hit the lunar surface.

MCDOWELL: This thing is about the size of a school bus. It's about 12 meters long. It's 4 tons. It's going to smash into the lunar surface at 5,600 miles an hour, so it's going to get completely destroyed.

SHIVARAM: McDowell says there have actually been missions in the past where scientists crashed things into the moon on purpose.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: The shepherding spacecraft has hit the surface of the moon.

SHIVARAM: As late as 2009, NASA has been experimenting with impacts on the moon's surface to test if water particles would be kicked up in the dust from the crash. But this Falcon 9 piece is adding to the growing concern about the sheer amount of space junk that's floating around - roughly 27,000 pieces that the U.S. government tracks, including things like old satellites. And it can be unclear who exactly is in charge of fixing the issue.

MCDOWELL: All the satellites are going in all different directions. There's not, like, a U.S. lane and a Russian lane, you know. And so we have to solve this in a global way.

SHIVARAM: As far as this crash in March, though, don't worry. McDowell says this collision shouldn't scare people on Earth. In fact, it's not even going to do much damage to the moon.

MCDOWELL: You know, the moon's had lots of things smashed into it over the years. It'll be fine.

SHIVARAM: Deepa Shivaram, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF DRAGON INN 3 SONG, "BAD BOY")

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