Chinese rocket puts on a show in the US
Print Edition
A fireball spotted streaking across the night sky in the western United States was almost certainly the body of a rocket used by China in December to launch a satellite.
Residents in Rocky Mountain states such as Idaho, Utah and Montana reported seeing the rocket on Monday night as it disintegrated in the atmosphere about 113 kilometers above the Earth, said Chris Anderson, manager of the Centennial Observatory at the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls.
Canadian photographer Neil Zeller was on his way home from shooting the Northern Lights when he saw the cluster of fireballs in a rural area outside Calgary about 11pm local time.
“I’d never seen anything like it,” he said. He captured several shots of an orange streak above dark trees.
More than 150 people reported seeing the group of about three dozen fireballs, said Mike Hankey with the American Meteor Society.
It lingered in the sky for more than a minute, showing slow movement that is a sure sign of a man-made object re-entering from space, he said. Naturally occurring meteors last just a few seconds.
An organization that studies orbital debris, or space junk, and attempts to pinpoint when and where objects will re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere had earlier predicted that the rocket which began its descent last year after sending a Chinese satellite into orbit would likely be seen about 2am local time on Tuesday in northern Russia, Anderson said.
The rocket, which was orbiting the Earth about every 87 minutes, made an early appearance elsewhere and in fiery fashion likely because its orientation may have changed as it tumbled through space in its final orbit, affecting the rate of speed, he said.
“It’s devilishly difficult to predict exactly when things will come down and where because it depends so much on the atmospheric drag and the orientation of the object as it plows through the air,” Anderson said.
NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory Solar System Ambassador Patrick Wiggins also told The Salt Lake Tribune newspaper he was “95 percent sure” the fiery sighting was of the re-entry of a Chinese rocket body used to launch the satellite Yaogan Weixing-26 in December.
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