A team of scientists identified a piece of space junk apparently headed toward Earth, though they are having trouble determining what it actually is.
According to Nature News, the scientists believe the space scrap will enter the Earth's atmosphere above the Indian Ocean on Nov. 13. Astronomers first noticed it in early Oct. somewhere beyond the orbit of the moon, but what it is still remains unclear.
The space junk is appropriately named WT1190F, but Nature News noted the designation (take away "1190" and see what is left) was purely coincidental. All the more mysterious is that the scientists were able to pinpoint when the object will arrive in the Earth's atmosphere.
Gerhard Drolshagen, co-manager of the European Space Agency's near-Earth objects office in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, told Nature News the systems in place to detect objects in space that may or may not represent a threat to Earth are working.
"What we planned to do seems to work," he said. "But it's still three weeks to go."
Bill Gray, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., indicated WT1190F will not do any real damage, but quipped to Nature News he "would not necessarily want to be going fishing directly underneath it."
The scrap of space junk also offers astronomers a rare chance to observe something enter the Earth's atmosphere in real time. WT1190F's approach also comes at a time in which NASA is tracking near-Earth asteroids, but there is not currently a similar program for objects farther away from Earth.
"There is no official, funded effort to do tracking of deep-Earth orbits the way we track low-Earth orbit," Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., told Nature News. "I think that has to change."
