Part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will be crashing into the moon in March this year—an unintended lunar collision that is likely the first of its kind.
The piece is a booster from a Falcon 9 rocket that SpaceX launched in February 2015 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The rocket carried NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite on what was supposed to be SpaceX’s first deep space mission. While DSCOVR made it to its target—a point thousands of miles from Earth that provides a stable orbit for the observatory—Falcon 9 faltered at its second stage.
After releasing its satellite, Falcon 9 was originally supposed to return to Earth. But the rocket went too high and lacked the energy to escape Earth’s atmosphere. It is currently space junk, and has been circling Earth in a chaotic orbit since then.
