Cloudy day prevent Si Lankans from seeing an historic event.
By Dileep Thekkethil
A cloudy sky played villain as many Sri Lankans who hoped to witness the rendezvous of a space junk with Earth was left with no option other than to watch it fall from the sky in a YouTube video filmed by NASA astronomer Peter Jenniskens, who along with a dozen veteran US, European, and UAE astronomers observed the event in a chartered jet.
According to Jenniskens, the sky was rumbling with dark clouds as the flight took off. At this point, he feared missing the event for which he travelled half way around the world.
But as the jet pierced into the dark clouds, the blue sky appeared and in a few minutes’ time, like it was predicted by astronomers, the debris codenamed WT1190F made its way into the earth’s atmosphere, first appearing just as a white dot but later firing up into fragmented objects, he said.
The debris, which made its contact with the earth at 6:20 PM IST self-destructed within a few seconds, but using more than 20 cameras, the researchers aboard the jet took images of the fireball falling from the sky.
Speaking to Nature, Peter told that the debris looked more fragile than he thought it would be and he also added that a lot more information regarding the UFO can be unearthed once the data collected by the instruments on board the jet is decoded. Peter believes that the info about the debris would be “fantastic data … that will be of interest for a long time to come.â€
The researchers from the United States, Germany and the United Arab Emirates who were on the jet to witness the event have obtained spectra that will help to identify the UFO, and imagery that will pinpoint the altitude, timing and chronology of the object’s demise.
The UFO was discovered in 2013 by Catalina Sky Survey (CSS), a project that carries out searches on Near Earth Objects (NEOs) and warns when such objects approach Earth. CSS observed it several times and early in this month it rediscovered the UFO.
WT1190F was approximately 2 meters long and it is likely to be a piece of a rocket. It also seemed as hollow and bent.
ESA’s NEO Coordination Centre (NEOCC) had confirmed that the space debris was orbiting the earth every three weeks in a non-circular – orbit. Scientists say that the disorderly gravity of sun and moon might have put the WT1190F in such an orbit. Though there are many such space junks orbiting around the earth and the moon, at present researchers observe only 20 of them.
Marco Michel at the NEOCC had earlier said that “the first goal will be to better understand the re-entry of satellites and debris from highly eccentric orbits. Second, it provides an ideal opportunity to test our readiness for any possible future atmospheric entry events involving an asteroid, since the components of this scenario, from discovery to impact, are all very similar.