[torotonnato]

That's what I thought too. Why not create a bit of distance to a possible reputational damage and spy on Russia at the same time too?

Not many data points, but fig. 4 (page 3) is interesting: a linear relation between luminosity and speed. For meteors should be, as intuitively expected, proportional to kinetic energy, hence quadratic.

Does this relation holds for missiles too?

EDIT: they are not related to NASA, it's in the second sentence of the abstract (ops)

...The Main Astronomical Observatory of NAS of Ukraine conducts an independent study of UAP also...