ලංකාවට_අත්භූත_යානයක_කොටස්
Mysterious artificial space object heading towards Earth
mysterious chunk of space debris will hit Earth off the coast of Sri Lanka on November 13. Scientists have no clear idea what it is, other than that it is likely artificial in origin, and have dubbed the object WT1190F.
“It’s a lost piece of space history that’s come back to haunt us,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Nature.
Detected by the Catalina Sky Survey, an observation lab at the University of Tucson, the alleged piece of space debris initially puzzled observers. But astronomers then went back through the lab’s past images from telescopes, and noticed that it had been present for quite a while.
From then on they calculated the orbit of the object, which has been circling the Earth at a further distance than the Moon, and deduced that the piece of cosmic refuse was likely placed there by man.
“To fit the solar radiation pressure effects on its orbit you need to assume a high area-to-mass ratio – implying the thing is hollow, like an empty rocket stage would be,” McDowell told Popular Mechanics.
“So it has the right size and properties, and it is in an orbit which would be surprising for a natural object (whizzing around the Earth-Moon system) but where we know there are a bunch of pieces of space junk.”
Read More on RT
Mysterious artificial space object heading towards Earth
mysterious chunk of space debris will hit Earth off the coast of Sri Lanka on November 13. Scientists have no clear idea what it is, other than that it is likely artificial in origin, and have dubbed the object WT1190F.
“It’s a lost piece of space history that’s come back to haunt us,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Nature.
Detected by the Catalina Sky Survey, an observation lab at the University of Tucson, the alleged piece of space debris initially puzzled observers. But astronomers then went back through the lab’s past images from telescopes, and noticed that it had been present for quite a while.
From then on they calculated the orbit of the object, which has been circling the Earth at a further distance than the Moon, and deduced that the piece of cosmic refuse was likely placed there by man.
“To fit the solar radiation pressure effects on its orbit you need to assume a high area-to-mass ratio – implying the thing is hollow, like an empty rocket stage would be,” McDowell told Popular Mechanics.
“So it has the right size and properties, and it is in an orbit which would be surprising for a natural object (whizzing around the Earth-Moon system) but where we know there are a bunch of pieces of space junk.”
Read More on RT
ගම අත ඇරලා ගියාවත්ද මේකට බයේ 
