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| GACspaceguy | I am sure everyone noticed they were flying a Gulfstream aircraft.  | |||||||
| carmelo | The debris WT1190F is the (or part of) lunar module of Apollo 10 Snoopy? But was not in a heliocentric orbit? According to Marco Micheli, an astronomer at the ESA Space Situational Awareness-Near Earth Object Coordination Centre (SSA-NEOCC), the object has been in Earth's orbit since at least 2009, and is speculated to be the rocket booster, aka 'Snoopy', from NASA's Apollo 10 mission in 1969. | |||||||
| Robert Pearlman | As of now, no one knows what WT1190F was, but it does not appear to have been Snoopy. Though the exact nature of the object remains unknown, and likely will for a long time, [NASA spokesperson Laura] Castillo said that it is believed to be a "low-density" man-made object. "So that would suggest something like panel as opposed to something round or more dense," Castillo said.The airborne researchers who captured footage and measurements of WT1190F's reentry say it was more fragile than the solid chunk of spacecraft that some thought it might be. The object's true identity may lie in the wealth of information obtained by the instruments on the jet. Not all of them collected data, but enough did that they generated "fantastic data... that will be of interest for a long time to come," [NASA scientist Peter] Jenniskens says. The researchers on the jet — from the United States, Germany and the United Arab Emirates — obtained spectra that should help identify the debris, and imagery that will pinpoint the altitude, timing and chronology of the object's demise. | |||||||
| Robert Pearlman | The WT1190F debris that fell into the Indian Ocean two months ago was most likely the remains of a rocket motor that propelled NASA's Lunar Prospector to the Moon in 1998, New Scientist reports, citing researchers studying the event. The junk's identity is by no means certain, but the "leading candidate" is the translunar injection module of Lunar Prospector, says Paul Chodas, an asteroid tracker at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The module nudged the probe out of Earth orbit and then detached from the main spacecraft, which orbited the Moon for 19 months before it was deliberately slammed into the lunar south pole in July 1999. | |||||||
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