Last Thursday, a piece from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was recovered on Tresco Island off the southwest coast of Great Britain. Recovered by the U.K.'s Maritime and Coastguard Agency, the debris was originally identified as a piece of the CRS-7 resupply mission to the International Space Station that launched and failed on June 28, 2015.

But Reddit wasn't fooled. The rocket panel didn't appear to have any damage associated with a failed launch. Reddit sleuths began a crowdsourced investigation to discover what mission the rocket debris actually came from. On Friday November 27, Reddit member __R__ revealed that the panel is from the successful CRS-4 mission that launched in September 2014.

"I got it! It's the CRS-4 interstage. Image proof. The falcon beak ends to the right side of the 'o' in 'Falcon', and the bulge above 'n' is different on CRS-4."

Other Redditors quickly confirmed the information. On the same day, the BBC updated a news story about the rocket panel, including a quote from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Jonathan McDowell:

All the geeks have been getting together and looking at fine details, and we're pretty sure it's a launch from September 2014 that successfully sent a cargo mission to the space station.

Crowdsourced investigations on Reddit can go badly—but they do seem to have a knack for IDing bits of space debris.

Sources: Reddit and BBC via Space News

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