A reentry of a suspected piece of space junk from a very high orbit on November 13, 2015, offers a great opportunity to gather data to improve our knowledge of how objects interact with the atmosphere of our planet, says a team of experts at ESA’s NEO Coordination Center.
WT1190F observed on October 9, 2015, with the University of Hawaii 2.2-m telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Image credit: B. Bolin / R. Jedicke / M. Micheli.
The object, named WT1190F, was first discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey on February 18, 2013, and has been observed several times since then by the same team of astronomers.
According to ESA experts, WT1190F is likely a discarded rocket body. It is orbiting Earth every three weeks in a highly eccentric orbit.
“NEO (near-Earth object) experts have used observational data to estimate the object’s density, which turns out to be much less than that of the solid rocky material that comprises many asteroids,” explained Dr Detlef Koschny of ESA’s Space Situational Awareness Program Office.
“This density is in fact compatible with the object being a hollow shell, such as the spent upper stage of a rocket body or part of a stage.”
WT1190F is now predicted to reenter Earth’s atmosphere in about two weeks, around 02:19 EDT (06:19 GMT, 07:19 CET) on November 13.
“The object is quite small, at most a couple of meters in diameter, and a significant fraction if not all of it can be expected to completely burn up in the atmosphere,” explained Dr Tim Flohrer of ESA’s Space Debris Office.
“Whatever is left is expected to fall into Indian Ocean about 60 miles (100 km) off the southern coast of Sri Lanka.”
The mass of WT1190F is not sufficient to cause any risk to the area, but the show will still be spectacular, since for a few seconds the object will become quite bright in the mid-day sky.
“This object is rather special as it is likely man-made, but was discovered by an NEO monitoring system and its orbit has many similarities with an NEO orbit,” Dr Flohrer said.
“This enables ESA experts to predict the impact time and location quite precisely, well in advance, which is usually not possible in comparison with reentering space-debris objects.”
