A big hunk of space trash is on a collision course with the moon. And experts say the fact that no one knows where the junk came from is both a symptom of our increasingly messy activities in space, and a growing problem for the future.
A big hunk of space trash is on a collision course with the moon. Some say it’s American, and some say it’s Chinese. Neither side is willing to concede they own the object.
At first, Gray figured the booster was part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched in 2015 and hauled the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’sinto orbit. That booster has spent the last seven years on an erratic journey around Earth, but nothing too out of the ordinary. “The object had about the brightness we would expect, and had showed up at the expected time and moving in a reasonable orbit,” GrayBut then Gray got an email from NASA that changed his mind.
Both sides can back up their claims, to an extent. Telemetry in the minutes following a rocket launch give operators on the ground a good starting point for a given spacecraft or leftover part of a spacecraft.If you observe a satellite in one moment and then want its position for the next day, then this is accurate, but if you want that position a year or more in advance, then this is nearly impossible.
One big variable that confounds these models is how the atmosphere affects the motion of satellites and junk. An object might shed parts of itself due to atmospheric drag, changing its trajectory. “Combining these problems means that predicting a position of an object far in the future is more and more difficult,” said Michalowski.
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