Much Ado About Space Junk

🚀🌕 A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched seven years ago is now set to crash into the Moon in less than two months, according to astronomer Bill Gray. It would be the first time in history a piece of space hardware unintentionally strikes the Moon.

• In a blog post, Gray said the space junk had "made a close lunar flyby on January 5" but is set for "a certain impact at March 4."
• The Falcon 9 booster was launched in February 2015 as part of the company’s first interstellar mission to send a climate observation satellite ~930,000 miles away.
• But the rocket didn’t have enough fuel to return to Earth after the long burn, so it's been hurtling around space in a “chaotic orbit” ever since.
• Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told ABC News the collision is nothing to worry about: “We used to do it deliberately back in the days of Project Apollo to actually do scientific experiments… and that didn't do any damage to the moon.”

+More lunar news: Japanese firm ispace announced plans to launch a private Moon lander by the end of this year. If successful, it would be the first intact lunar landing by a Japanese spacecraft.

+Go deeper: Space Junk Keeps Piling Up