NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) photographed the crater. The researchers said that the two craters partially overlapped, one 18 meters in diameter and the other 16 meters in diameter, forming a double meteorite with a maximum width of 29 meters pit.
The mysterious rocket crashed into the Hertzsprung crater, creating a double crater. Mark Robinson, principal investigator of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), said the formation of the double crater was unexpected, suggesting that the rocket body had a lot of mass at both ends. Generally speaking, the mass of the spent rocket is mainly in the engine end, and the rest is mainly an empty fuel tank.
Since the identity of the mysterious rocket is currently unknown, the double crater may help trace its origin. There has been speculation that the mysterious rocket may be the last stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which completed the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) mission for NASA and NOAA in February 2015. But further observations and calculations denied this speculation.
No other rocket so far has formed a double crater after hitting the moon, and the four Apollo SIV-B craters have irregular profiles (Apollo 13, 14, 15, 17), but each is larger than this double crater much more (over 35 meters). The maximum width of the double crater formed by the mysterious rocket impact is close to the width of S-IVB
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