Fragments of “Apollo” collapsed in Sri Lanka – Dni.Ru

15:47 / 13.11.2015 Earth, space Pieces of debris under the code WT1190F, representing fragments of spent rocket stages, most likely one of the American mission “Apollo”, fell to the ground. The accident occurred in the southern part of the island of Sri Lanka.

Photo: GLOBAL LOOK press Gene Blevins

As the astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who is the observatory in Colombo, the largest city of Sri Lanka, object WT1190F entered the upper atmosphere at about 09:18 MSK, moving at a speed of 39,000 kilometers per hour. The scientist noted that the observation of falling objects interfere with thick clouds and bad weather conditions.

“heavenly body” several meters long due to high speed could not burn down completely in the atmosphere of our planet . Experts note that in the southern part of the island was a fine rain of debris. Most of them fell into the waters of the Indian Ocean.

Surprisingly, for the first time in history, astronomers have to calculate in advance the time and place of falling space body on Earth. In this regard, the specialists of the European Space Agency (ESA) used drop fragments of spent rocket stage of the mission “Apollo” as the simulation of the asteroid , like Chelyabinsk meteorite, for testing warning systems and calculation of the flight path.

The object WT1190F was opened two years ago, in February 2013. However, this “artificial satellite” Earth was soon lost, astronomers thought that he would not return to the vicinity of our planet. As it turned out, the chip rotate at a very elongated orbit, the far end of which was located beyond the orbit of the Moon . This astronomers to observe not yet had.

allegedly “parent” of the object can be two rather old interplanetary mission. WT1190F may be a fragment of the upper stage of the US probe Lunar Prospector, sent to the Moon in 1998 in the “Apollo” or the Japanese Mars probe “Nozomi”, which flew past Earth’s natural satellite around the same time.

‘); if (“undefined” === typeof loaded_blocks_da) {loaded_blocks_da = []; function n () {var e = loaded_blocks_da.shift (); var t = e.adp_id; var r = e. div; var i=document.createElement(“script”);i.type=”text/javascript”;i.async=true;i.charset=”windows-1251″;i.src=”//www.nnn.ru/show.cgi?async=1&adp=”+t+”&div=”+r+”&t=”+Math.random();var s=document.getElementsByTagName(“head”)[0]||document.getElementsByTagName(“body”)[0];s.appendChild(i);var o=setInterval(function(){if(document.getElementById(r).innerHTML&&loaded_blocks_da.length){n();clearInterval(o)}},50)}setTimeout(n)}loaded_blocks_da.push({adp_id:e,div:t})})(234732)