Some strange things have been happening in the skies as of late, including the discovery of a piece of space junk headed towards Earth about one month ago.
Some strange things have been happening in the skies as of late, including the discovery of a piece of space junk headed towards Earth about one month ago. As it turns out, that piece of debris has finally landed, crashing down earlier today in the Indian Ocean at about 1:15 a.m. ET.
The space junk, which was given the codename WT1190F, reportedly entered the Earth’s atmosphere today and landed in the Indian Ocean, about 50 miles off the coast of Sri Lanka, slightly more than a month after it was first discovered. Scientists spotted the debris on October 3, and have been paying close attention to its trajectory and movements, allowing them to predict when and where it would land on Earth. Still, NASA maintained that the space junk was never a threat to the planet, owing to its small size.
Not much is known about the space junk up to now, and according to NASA spokeswoman Laura Castillo, that may be the case for quite a while. She did speculate, however, that it may be a “low-density” man-made object, meaning “something like panel as opposed to something round or more dense.” Castillo said the object may have been about three to six feet long.
Separately, officials from the European Space Agency have released statements saying that they are sure the space debris was “something artificial,” and not organic. “It was a probably an upper stage of a rocket that went to the moon a long time ago but we still don’t really know,” said ESA Near Earth Object office head Detlef Koschny in an interview with ABC News. He added that the image of the object was last seen via telescope in 2009, but it’s still impossible to associate the debris with any specific space mission.