Piece of SpaceX rocket believed to have crashed into the moon

25 pointsposted 15 hours ago
by thm

10 Comments

rich_sasha

13 hours ago

SpaceX in a nutshell: simultaneously going to the moon and crashing.

jrmg

14 hours ago

Will we be able to get pictures of this?

I presume that if the answer is ‘yes’ we will do so, and I’d like to see some!

simondotau

14 hours ago

The answer is no. Hubble's visible-light resolution is about 0.05 arcseconds, which translates to 90 metres per pixel, far too large to make out anything that's "merely" bus sized. An imager would need to in orbit around the moon to have any reasonable chance.

It seems like they're hoping to detect the plume of dust caused by the collision, however.

NetMageSCW

14 hours ago

The crater created by the impact with the dust throw around it will be bigger.

garaetjjte

14 hours ago

...but there's a imager in orbit around the moon, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

dylan604

14 hours ago

Multiple lunar orbiters will be passing overhead at some point. They will produce images of the after effects that can be used in a before/after comparison. But the crash will(was??) not be televised or live streamed which is probably more along what you are asking.

noiv

14 hours ago

[flagged]

altmanaltman

14 hours ago

The memes write themselves

simondotau

14 hours ago

Astronaut 1: “Wait, the lunar landing system is just gravity?”

Astronaut 2: “Always has been.”