The errant stage might be from a Chinese rocket launched in 2014.
on his website Saturday after receiving a note from an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jon Giorgini.
An image of the rocket stage headed for a moon impact on March 4 as seen on Feb. 6, 2022, when it was thought to be a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage. Astronomers tracking it now say it is likely a Chinese rocket stage.slam into the far side of the moon "Prompted by Jon's e-mail, I dug into my e-mail archives to remind myself why I had originally identified the object as the DSCOVR stage in the first place, seven years ago. I did that digging in full confidence it would prove that the object was, in fact, the DSCOVR second stage,"He was using data from the Catalina Sky Survey that usually tracks near-Earth objects to assess threats to Earth, Gray wrote.
"I and others came to accept the identification with the second stage [of Falcon 9] as correct. The object had about the brightness we would expect, and had showed up at the expected time and moving in a reasonable orbit," Gray continued, but noted the evidence was"circumstantial" rather than fully conclusive.