Scientists have discovered that an unidentified flying object (UFO), which may be a piece of old ma- made space junk around a few 2m long, is headed straight for earth. It’s also giving astronomers the chance to test-drive a coordinated network they’ve put in place for occasions when more unsafe space objects comes a-knockin’. It is expected to land into the Indian Ocean off the southern tip of Sri Lanka.
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Richard Kowalski, senior research specialist with the Catalina Sky Survey at University of Arizona, Tucson, wrote in a Facebook post with a map projecting the area where the debris could hit that it was discovered on October 3 by Rose Matheny.
Watson added that the object could be a spent rocket stage or paneling shed by a recent Moon mission.
Bill Gray, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., indicated WT1190F will not do any real damage, but quipped to Nature News he “would not necessarily want to be going fishing directly underneath it”. Usually scientists keep track of space debris, however, this time researchers lost the track and were astonished to see that the object is about to crash on Earth.
An observing campaign is now taking shape to follow the object as it dives through Earth’s atmosphere, says Gerhard Drolshagen, co-manager in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, of the European Space Agency’s near-Earth objects office. WT1190F, with a highly elliptical orbit tracing twice as far out as the Earth-Moon distance, is a pretty special piece of trash.
With its average density being about 10 percent water, the ESA said that it is likely manmade and not a space rock.
The space junk will crash into Earth next month. Watson mentioned, “It is also possible that debris dates back decades, perhaps even to Apollo era”.
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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.
