Mysterious space object heading to Sri Lanka

Wednesday, 28 October 2015 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

A mysterious chunk of space debris will hit Earth off the coast of Sri Lanka on 13 November, Russia Today news channel said. Scientists have no clear idea what it is, other than that it is likely artificial in origin, and have dubbed the object WT1190F.

The object, dubbed WTF1190F, is set to land in the Indian Ocean, around 40 miles off the southern tip of Sri Lanka, at 6:20 UTC.

It measures up to seven ft long and it could be a piece of rocket stage from a recent lunar mission, or even part of an Apollo program craft that has been in space for more than 40 years.

“It’s a lost piece of space history that’s come back to haunt us,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has told Nature.

Detected by the Catalina Sky Survey, an observation lab at the University of Tucson, the alleged piece of space debris initially puzzled observers. But astronomers then went back through the lab’s past images from telescopes, and noticed that it had been present at least since 2012.

From then on they calculated the orbit of the object, which has been circling the Earth at a longer orbit than the Moon, and deduced that the piece of cosmic refuse was likely placed there by man.

“To fit the solar radiation pressure effects on its orbit you need to assume a high area-to-mass ratio – implying the thing is hollow, like an empty rocket stage would be,” McDowell told Popular Mechanics.

“So it has the right size and properties, and it is in an orbit which would be surprising for a natural object (whizzing around the Earth-Moon system) but where we know there are a bunch of pieces of space junk.”

Astrophysicists believe that the object could even be a memento of the Apollo missions that took US astronauts to the moon. But scientists may never discover for sure: WT1190F’s re-entry into the atmosphere would likely burn up most of the debris, before dumping it in an extremely remote spot. (Daily Mail)

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