Space X rocket thought to have hit Moon

**Oliver Conway** (0:00)
This is The Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. We're recording this at 15 Hours GMT on Wednesday the 5th of August. A SpaceX rocket is believed to have crashed into the moon at seven times the speed of sound. Police in Mexico are investigating why a social media influencer was shot dead during a live stream. And a warning that the El Nino weather pattern could leave nearly 50 million more people dangerously short of food.
Also on the podcast, we hear from a 23-year-old Moroccan who crossed into the Spanish territory of Ceuta last week.

**Ayub** (0:40)
I swam for about one kilometer. That was probably the most traumatic experience I've ever had in my life.

**Oliver Conway** (0:48)
And?

**Burt Blocken** (0:48)
They're sticking objects behind their shirt in order to deviate the air flow around their body. And that actually reduces the air resistance of the cyclists by a few tens of percent.

**Oliver Conway** (1:01)
Women cyclists face checks to make sure they're not using their bras to cheat at the Tour de France.
Now, it wasn't supposed to end like this, but a SpaceX rocket that went astray is thought to have crashed into the moon. The four-ton section of spacecraft is believed to have smashed down on the lunar surface near the Einstein crater. Keith Cowing, editor of the NASA Watch Blog, says it's not the first time the moon has been hit.

**Keith Cowing** (1:31)
Funny thing, some of the stages that we did the same thing with back in the Apollo era are still orbiting the sun. And every now and then one of them gets sighted and the astronomers can't decide if it's an asteroid or a rocket stage and they eventually have to analyse the spectrum. They say, oh, we can tell that that's titanium paint, that must be the Apollo, whatever it is, stage. So it's a bit of a hunt and seek game sometime, but if nothing else, it's kind of cool to watch things smash into a planet.

**Oliver Conway** (2:05)
Our reporter Richard Hamilton explains what happened.

**Richard Hamilton** (2:08)
Back in January last year, this SpaceX, it was a US Japanese mission to send equipment to the moon including lunar landers. There were two parts to this rocket. The booster returned to earth, but the upper stage went into orbit and strayed off course. Scientists say this was a mixture of solar activity and gravitational forces that put it on a path towards the moon.
So, they were expecting a very spectacular display, a vast sunlit plume of rubble and debris coming out of the moon's surface. Of course, this would only have been observed through powerful telescopes, not through the naked eye.
But the BBC spoke to Rodrigo Palominos, who's a telescope operator at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. You get the best view of the moon from the Americas. And he said, We did not obtain an obvious detection of the impact, but that's not unexpected. The event itself is very brief, and the lunar surface is illuminated, which makes it more difficult to identify a clear signal. However, our instruments did record a measurement that suggests something happened at the expected time and location. The data indicate that an event may have occurred, but we now need to calibrate the observations and carry out a detailed scientific analysis. So basically, not as spectacular perhaps as they were hoping, but they will still be able to analyse the data and find out more.

**Oliver Conway** (3:44)
And once they've carried out that detailed analysis, what will they be able to learn from this?

**Richard Hamilton** (3:49)
Well, since NASA wants to establish what they call a sustained presence on the moon, they're hoping to learn more about the composition of the planet itself and what effect an impact like this might have. We heard more from Libby Jackson, who's a space exploration expert and the head of space at the Science Museum in London.

**Libby Jackson** (4:12)
The scientists will have a lot more information as they study the debris that they hope that will be ejected from the collision. By studying the light that is reflected from that material, scientists can analyse the light and determine the composition of the material, which helps them understand the composition of the moon in the impact site. And that's great for the scientists who want to understand how the moon was developed, what it's made of, its history, potentially its future, and how planetary systems, how the moon, how the Earth and the moon system evolved and were formed billions of years ago.

**Richard Hamilton** (4:45)
So scientists like Libby Jackson and particularly NASA are keen to emphasise there will be a positive outcome from this crash. But other people are warning that this is a sign of how much space debris is out there. For example, 54,000 objects are thought to be in space larger than 10 centimetres. And since the space age first began, 17,000 tonnes have been launched into space.