Last Friday night (March 17), as many marked the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day by quenching their thirst at their nearest watering hole, some sky-gazing citizens in Sacramento, California were left wide-eyed at the scene of fiery trails. of light above.
Witnesses of the fiery phenomenon, which lasted about 40 seconds, took to social media with videos of the mysterious sight, and the Internet soon gave some answers to confused patrons, according to a CBS News Sacramento (opens in new tab) report.
After witnessing the event, the owner of King Cong Brewing Company posted a video of the brewpub’s Instagram account (opens in new tab) to consult the masses what they saw. Astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and proven member of orbital police Jonathan McDowell is known for solving these types of orbital enigmasand the culprit is quickly classified.
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In a threads (opens in new tab) posted on Twitter, McDowell indicated that Friday’s fireballs were the natural result of the end of life of space debris burning up in Earth’s atmosphere, specifically, a relatively small communications packet that was once attached to the International Space Station (ISS).
Designated ICS-EF, the 683 lbs (310 kg) retired component is responsible for enabling communications between the Kibo module of the ISS and Mission Control. ICS-EF was launched in 2009, and jettisoned from the ISS into a decaying orbit in 2020.
Such sightings are likely to become more common. Currently, NASA and the Department of Defense track up to 27,000 known pieces of space debris, and companies like SpaceX launch satellites in the thousands – all designed with atmospheric disintegration following their usefulness. -operational benefit. And while there is little risk of any of these fireballs of space debris in the sky turning into craters on the ground, there is always the risk of causing satellites and other vehicles in orbit.
As recently as March 6, the ISS had to perform a maneuver to avoid a potential collision along with one of several satellites whose decaying orbits are beginning to enter the space station’s flight path.
Currently, there are several proposed ideas in the space industry on how to deal with space debris and an increasingly dense low Earth orbit, but none should be put into active operation yet.
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