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The junk, affectionately (or, rather, officially) named WT1190F, has left many speculating about when and from where it may have come. Experts all generally agree that it was left in orbit by a past space mission, and Nature reports that it could be decades old, dating way back to the Apollo era.
Described as "lost" because of its crazy orbit, which for years has taken the junk far beyond the Moon, WT1190F had been ignored and unidentified until it was spotted by Catalina Sky Survey in October -- which is a programme that discovers any asteroids and comets that are swinging just a little too close to Earth.
Experts believe the junk is likely to impact Earth over the Indian Ocean, about 65 kilometres off the southern tip of Sri Lanka.
According to Nature, WT1190F is less then two metres in size, and its trajectory shows it's low-density, maybe even hollow. This suggests it could be anything from a piece of panelling, shed by a recent Moon mission, to an Apollo booster.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, ominously says it's "a lost piece of space history that’s come back to haunt us".
Regardless of what this unidentified, hollow piece of space trash is, it's going to give scientists a valuable opportunity to see how man-made space junk interacts with the atmosphere. It'll also be a good opportunity to test the systems that are currently in place to protect against more harmful space debris in the future.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
