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Something was visible in the night sky over Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana in the predawn hours on Wednesday. fireball burned Shades of green, gold and pink leave a bright trail behind. It spent about two minutes breaking apart into smaller pieces as it descended from orbit before crossing the United States and Canada border somewhere on the Great Lakes.
“I saw it coming from the sky,” said Stephanie Neal, a Williamsburg, Ohio resident who saw the object. “First it had no tail, then no tail, then no tail again.”
“This was surprising,” another witness in Batavia, Ohio, said in a report to the American Meteor Society. hotline where people can report fireballs they see in the sky, these are typically rocks that are disintegrating in Earth’s atmosphere. “Especially because there’s a full moon tonight and yet it’s so bright and visible.”
was not one unexplained weather phenomenon As the Pentagon describes UFOs these days, even A meteor from the orionid showerIt peaked early Thursday morning.
Instead, it was likely a recently launched Russian military satellite and was showing signs of failure before plunging into Earth’s atmosphere and burning up, according to orbital trackers.
The classified Russian spacecraft, identified by the US Space Command database as COSMOS 2551, was launched on September 9 from Russia’s Plesetsk Space Base, about 500 miles north of Moscow.
Few details about the satellite were accepted by the Russian military, but it was headed for an orbital path above the Earth’s poles. The Russian Ministry of Defense said the launch and satellite deployment were successful.
But soon after reaching space, satellite trackers noticed a gradual descent in the spacecraft’s altitude.
“Ninety-nine percent certainty was a failure,” said Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who watches orbiting objects and closely monitors the Russian satellite.
Dr. McDowell said the satellite likely burned up in the atmosphere before hitting land.
“Re-entry of Russian satellites over the US happens occasionally – maybe a few times in the last five years, off the top of my head.”
The Russian Ministry of Defense did not respond to requests for comment.
Skywatchers have witnessed other major uncontrolled re-entries of old or faulty spacecraft this year. Sometimes objects associated with launches survive when they return to the surface, such as a pressure vessel from part of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Crashed into a man’s farm in Washington in April. Later in May, Large pieces of debris from a Chinese rocket It splashed into the waters off the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.
It was not known exactly where parts of China’s Long March 5B rocket would re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. Renewing this uncertainty requires more specific international rules governing space activities. NASA administrator Bill Nelson criticized China at the time, saying Beijing “failed to meet responsible standards regarding space debris.”
While a 1972 United Nations treaty makes countries liable for damage caused by objects launched from their own soil, international rules barring conditions that can cause damage in space are few—like a dead spacecraft returning to the atmosphere. In recent years, as multiple companies, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, aim to ship, US officials have called for new road rules to accommodate an increasingly busy orbital highway. thousands of internet beaming satellites into low Earth orbit.
“The higher you go, the lower it gets,” said Mike Hankey, an amateur meteorite hunter who manages the American Meteor Society’s fireball database, of recent cases of space debris causing pyrotechnic sky displays. “It’s not my favorite thing to work on, but it happens a lot more and the system can track that well.”
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