By Lachlan Abbott
A large flaming object that lit up Melbourne’s sky overnight is thought to be debris from a Russian rocket used to send a satellite into space.
Victorians captured videos showing a bright fireball travelling across the night sky late on Monday, close to midnight.
Social media posts indicate it was seen from Melbourne’s CBD as well as outer suburbs such as Sunbury and Mornington. Residents in regional Victoria and South Australia also reported seeing the flashes of light.
The Australian Space Agency said that the flashes of light were likely the remnants of a Russian Soyuz-2 rocket re-entering Earth’s atmosphere.
“Launch of the Soyuz-2 rocket occurred from Plesetsk Cosmodrome earlier in the evening. According to Russian authorities, the launch placed a new generation ‘GLONASS-K2’ global navigation satellite into orbit,” the space agency said in a statement.
“This launch was notified and remnants of the rocket were planned to safely re-enter the atmosphere into the ocean off the south-east coast of Tasmania.”
Professor Alan Duffy, a Swinburne University astronomer, told 3AW: “It was the biggest light show that I’ve ever seen, in terms of a re-entry of some kind of material from orbit.”
Duffy said the streak of light was burning brightly and moving slowly while breaking up midair, indicating it was likely man-made, rather than a meteor or comet.
Dr Gail Iles, a physicist from RMIT University, said there was a chance the fireball was a meteor, as the sighting coincided with this weekend’s Perseid meteor shower, but “it’s far more likely that this is a piece of a rocket”.
“The common consensus seems to be that the Russians launched a Soyuz rocket from Plesetsk – that’s their northern launch site in Russia – and they were launching a navigation satellite at exactly the time that everyone would have seen this space debris,” Iles said on 3AW.
The United States’ National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency website shows a “HYDROPAC” navigational warning was issued days ago for space debris tracking over the western South Pacific Ocean.
“So if you look at that space track, then you will see that it passes directly over Australia, it passes over South Australia into Victoria, and then kind of bends around over Tasmania, and is likely to have ended up in the ocean,” Iles said.
Iles said the Russian satellite was launched about 10pm AEST on Monday. The sighting over Melbourne was likely to be of the second-stage rocket returning to Earth after burning out roughly 170 kilometres above the ground, she said.
“It is steadily decreasing size, so the thing that we saw was probably one to two metres by that point. And I would say by the time it hit the ocean, it was much smaller,” Iles said.
Associate Professor Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist from Flinders University, said Victorians and Tasmanians saw an identical rocket – which weighs 105 tonnes and is 25 metres long – burning-up in May 2020.
She said any remnants of this rocket would’ve ended up in the sea after last night’s “spectacular fireworks show”.
“There were also reports of a sonic boom and people felt their houses shake,” Gorman said.
“Although it was moving much slower than a meteor, the rocket was still fast enough to break the sound barrier. When the US Skylab space station fell back to Earth over Western Australia in 1979, there was also a sonic boom and farmers reported animals being agitated.”
Associate Professor Michael Brown, from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Monash University, said it was rare for space junk to damage property, although another Soyuz rocket re-entered over Melbourne back in 2014, and some pieces of the rocket were found in rural NSW afterwards.
“Space junk re-entries are sometimes confused with meteors, which are also spectacular but usually far shorter events as they slam into the atmosphere at over 10 kilometres per second,” Brown said.
“As orbital rocket launches have increased over the past decade, and everyone has cameras in their phones, more and more people are seeing space junk re-entries and recognising them for what they are.”
Iles, a lecturer at RMIT, said a shallow angle of re-entry helped Victorians view the space debris burn across the sky for a considerable amount of time.
The physicist added: “This was very controlled. This was predicted. It has been announced on the HYDROPAC website for days. We were going to see this for sure.”
Duffy, the Swinburne University astronomer, said reports of people hearing sounds from the nighttime fireball were “extraordinary”.
He said space junk re-entering the atmosphere usually prompted planes in the area to be put on hold to avoid an unlikely – but not impossible – midair collision.
Professor Richard de Grijs, a Macquarie University astrophysicist and executive director of the International Space Science Institute – Beijing in China, said the chances of a piece of space junk falling back to Earth were increasing year-on-year.
“Astronauts on their way to or at the International Space Station or, for that matter, those travelling to Tiangong, the Chinese Space Station, are more and more at risk of being hit by random bits of junk,” de Grijs said.
“We can expect to see more of such bright, man-made ‘meteors’ if we don’t find a way to deal with our unbridled ambitions in space, which will soon make the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ pale in comparison.”
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