“It would be very nice if the people who are putting these boosters into high orbits would publicly disclose what they put there and where they are going instead of having to do all this detective work,” Mr. Gray said.
But if this wasn’t a DSCOVR missile, what was? Mr. Gray has moved through other launches in the previous months, focusing on those bound for the moon. “There isn’t much in that category,” Mr. Gray said.
The biggest candidate was the Long March 3C rocket that launched the Chinese Chang’e-5 T1 spacecraft on October 23, 2014. That spacecraft swung around the Moon and returned to Earth, where it dropped a small return capsule that landed in Mongolia. It was a test leading up to the Chang’e-5 mission in 2020 that successfully collected moon rocks and dust and returned them for study on Earth.
A computer simulation of WE0913A’s orbit in time showed that it would have flown close to the moon on October 28, five days after the Chinese launch.
Additionally, Mr. Gray said that orbital data from cubes that were associated with the third stage of the Long March rocket “is pretty much a dead ring” to WE0913A. “It’s the kind of case you’re likely to take to a jury and get a conviction.”
More observations this month have changed the prediction of when the object will hit the moon by a few seconds and a few miles to the east. “It’s still like the same thing,” said Christophe Demoutis, an amateur astronomer in northeastern France.