A rocket wreckage crashed on the lunar surface on March 4. The wreckage was initially thought to be the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched in February 2015 and later believed to belong to the Long March 3C carrier rocket that launched Chang’e 5 in October 2014, a notion China has denied. Unraveling its identity may require an investigation on the moon. Now researchers at NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) report they’ve discovered the location of the crashed rocket wreckage. LRO images show that the rocket left two impact craters on the lunar surface, 18 meters wide in the east and 16 meters wide in the west. The creation of two impact craters surprised the researchers. The weight of the rocket wreckage is usually concentrated in the engine section and the rest are empty fuel tanks, but the two craters show that both ends of the rocket body are heavier. This feature may help reveal its origin.
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