Astronomer Bill Gray, developer of Project Pluto, a software program for tracking near-Earth-objects, comets, and asteroids spotted it first.
Gray was the first to notice that the object wasn’t an asteroid since it wasn’t orbiting the sun. It was orbiting the earth. And it was assigned the tracking name “WE0913A.”
He initially claimed it was one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets. Gray suggested it was a Falcon X stage two rocket launched in 2015. And voiced his suspicions it was constructed by humans.
SpaceX proved to NASA and Gray that it wasn’t their rocket.
Gray soon said that it must be the upper stage of a T1 rocket, which the Chinese launched in 2014. The Chinese denied it was theirs. And said that the 2014 rocket completely burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.
The U.S. Department of Defense’s Space Command released a March 1st statement that China’s 2014 flight never deorbited.
Gray blogged after the images were released that the unidentified rocket is “quite conclusively identified as the Chang’e 5-T1 booster.”
