posted 10-23-2015 09:33 PM               

WT1190F was detected by the Catalina Sky Survey, a program aimed at discovering asteroids and comets that swing close to Earth. At first scientists didn't know what to make of this weird body. But they quickly computed its trajectory, after collecting more observations and unearthing 2012 and 2013 sightings from telescope archives, says independent astronomy software developer Bill Gray, who has been working to track the debris with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

WT1190F travels a highly elliptical orbit, swinging out twice as far as the Earth-Moon distance, Gray says. Gray's calculations show that it will hit the Earth at 6:20 UTC, falling about 65 kilometres off the southern tip of Sri Lanka. Much if not all of it will burn up in the atmosphere, but "I would not necessarily want to be going fishing directly underneath it," Gray says.

The object is only 1 to 2 metres in size, and its trajectory shows it is low-density, perhaps hollow. That suggests an artificial object, "a lost piece of space history that's come back to haunt us", says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It could be a spent rocket stage or paneling shed by a recent Moon mission. It is also possible that the debris dates back decades, perhaps even to the Apollo era.

posted 10-27-2015 05:33 PM            

A strange piece of space junk is expected to plummet to Earth in November, but researchers don't currently have any idea what it is.

The object, dubbed WTF1190F, is set to land in the Indian Ocean, around 40 miles (65km) off the southern tip of Sri Lanka, at 6:20 UTC on 13 November.

It measures up to 7ft (2 metres) 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.

posted 11-13-2015 01:23 AM               

Few if any pieces of the object were expected to survive the descent. If they did, they would have splashed into the Indian Ocean, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) off the southern coast of Sri Lanka.

The initial reports on Twitter suggest that WT1190F was a no-show in Sri Lanka.

Good candidates for WT1190F's identity are the TLI Stage for Lunar Prospector, and the final stage rocket for Japan's Nozomi probe.

Too small to be [Apollo 10 LM ascent stage] Snoopy, and Snoopy is pretty certainly in solar orbit.

posted 11-13-2015 08:16 AM               

The International Astronomical Center (IAC) and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency hosted a team of veteran U.S. and German observers of spacecraft re-entries to study the re-entry of an approximately 1-meter piece of space debris near Sri Lanka on November 13, 2015.

posted 11-14-2015 09:13 AM               

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.

posted 11-14-2015 09:22 AM               

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 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.

posted 01-13-2016 10:59 PM               

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.

...observations collected by the airborne team on 13 November also point to Lunar Prospector. The spectra of one large fragment of WT1190F include signals of titanium oxide and hydrogen, says astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who presented the observations on 5 January at a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in San Diego, California. So the object could have been a titanium-walled vessel containing residual fuel, he says, although he declines to speculate about its identity. Lunar Prospector's translunar injection module had a titanium case, whereas a similar module on another leading candidate, Japan's Nozomi Mars probe, had a case made from carbon fibre.