An unidentified flying object (UFO) named WT1190F or WTF is heading straight for Earth. It will fall into the Indian Ocean almost 65 kilometers off the southern tip of Sri Lanka.
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The piece measures up to 7ft long and was rediscovered just this month after scientists lost track of its orbit far beyond the Moon.
The unusual object was discovered in early October by the Catalina Sky Survey, a project meant to provide early warning of approaching comets and asteroids. According to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the object could be a piece of a past space mission that has come back to make another appearance on Earth. It could be a spent rocket stage or panelling shed by a recent Moon mission. There is lots of man-made space junk but WT1190F is the first ever to crash into Earth.
An observing campaign is now taking shape to follow the object as it dives through Earth’s atmosphere, says Gerhard Drolshagen, co-manager of the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object office in Noordwijk, Netherlands. According to Traci Watson at Nature News, it travels a highly elliptical orbit, swinging out twice as far as the Earth-Moon distance, its movements suggesting that it’s low-density enough to be hollow on the inside. It’s likely that the debris dates back many years, even to the Apollo era.
Scientists are also excited about the space junk because it offers a rare opportunity to plan for and track the return of a piece of debris. It’ll also be a good opportunity to test the systems that are now in place to protect against more harmful space debris in the future.
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Unlike near-Earth asteroids, space debris that flies well away from the planet has not been afforded significant amounts of funding or attention.
