How a SpaceX rocket ended up hurtling towards the Moonpublished at 06:27 BST
Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent
The story began in January last year, when a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Florida carrying two lunar landers into space.
The rocket’s job was to fire its upper stage hard enough to send both landers out of Earth orbit and onto a path towards the Moon, and it succeeded.
But the spent stage was left drifting in a long, looping orbit that swung it out towards the Moon and back again.
Over the following 18 months, the gentle gravitational tug of the Earth, Moon and Sun – along with even the faint push of sunlight itself – gradually altered its path.
Astronomers tracking the object eventually worked out that those small nudges had put it on a course toward the Moon, picking up speed by the day and heading for an almighty crash.
