Well, WTF is exactly what it is. Scientists are calling the rogue piece of space junk WT1190F. It’ll impact Earth at 6:20 UTC on November 13, splashing into the Indian Ocean just off the southern tip of Sri Lanka. It was rediscovered just this month after scientists lost track of its orbit far beyond the Moon and pretty much forgot about it.
The space debris only 3-6 feet long, now on a collision course with Earth, and it sounds like a movie we’ve already seen.
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 suggest that it’s low-density enough to be hollow on the inside. So WT1190F is this thing?
“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. An object seen orbiting the Earth in 2002 was eventually determined to be a discarded segment of the Saturn V rocket that launched the first men to land on the Moon.”
If scientists do figure out that this thing was made by us it will be the first known instance of our own space trash returning home. Or as Jonathan McDowell from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics puts it,
“A lost piece of space history that’s come back to haunt us.”
Most of the object is expected to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, and whatever’s left will hurtle into the Indian Ocean. While there likely won’t be much of WT1190F left.
But WT1190F might be the only impact we’ve got coming up in the near future (that we know about), but it’s not the only close encounter we can look forward to. On Halloween, October 31, asteroid 2015 TB145 – a sizeable chunk of rock that’s hurtling through space at speeds of over 126,000 mph – is expected to just miss us. Whew!
(via Science Alert)
The post #WTF?: A Mysterious Chunk of “Space Junk” Will Hit Earth on November 13. WTF Is It? appeared first on World of Wonder.