An unidentified flying object (UFO) named WT1190F or WTF is heading straight for Earth.
WTF - crashing into the Indian Ocean
The object has been put in to a highly elliptical orbit, given Earth and Sun’s gravitational pull and is now on its way towards our planet. Much of the hollow object, which may be a spent rocket stage or panelling shed by a recent Moon mission, should burn up in the atmosphere.
As old as the Apollo era?
Experts generally agree that it was left in orbit by a past space mission, and Nature magazine reports that it could be decades old, dating way back to the Apollo era. The debris might be a discarded parts of a spaceship or even a remnant from the Saturn V rockets which took Apollo astronauts to the moon or even a fuel tank considering it’s “hollow” appearance.
Space trash returning home
Amazingly, if scientists do figure out that this thing was made by us and launched into space only to get separated and lost for several years, it will be the first known instance of our own space trash returning home. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, ominously says it’s “a lost piece of space history that’s come back to haunt us”.
Independent astronomy software developer Bill Gray, who has been working to track the debris with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told journal Nature: “I would not necessarily want to be going fishing directly underneath it”. It’ll also be a good opportunity to test the systems that are now in place to protect against more harmful space debris in the future.
