Space debris bursts into flames while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
Flames burst over the sky of Las Vegas this week, as one night something looking like multiple shooting stars stormed down to Earth.
Another astronomer said that it looked like a combination of space junk and meteors. However, it looked nothing like a meteor shower. The ball of fire stayed in the sky for over 30 seconds.
The object had been seen from Lennox, Adelanto, Riverside, and Lancaster, as well as Utah. Social media exploded with videos and reports of the sky flames.
The National Weather Service declared that the incident was not weather-related. Likewise, the Vandenberg Air Force Base stated they did not have anything planned for launch on Wednesday night.
UFO enthusiasts were very upset to see that the Pentagon, who should keep track of every object in the sky, did not make any declaration concerning the object. From their point of view, the authorities are too scared of anything that might resemble an alien ship, so they try to cover up with pseudo-scientific explanations, and do not even try to investigate the case.
Andrew Kerr from the College of Southern Nevada Planetarium studied the video and explained the mystery. The big space objects that enter the atmosphere are monitored by the Joint Space Operation Center, and NASA analyzes them.
The scientists agree the falling object from the sky was, in fact, a piece of a Chinese rocket that was launched in June. The orbit of the spacecraft comes lower and lower, and in the end, it can reach the upper layers around Earth and re-enter the atmosphere.
“The orbits kind of start to come down and decay and decay then finally when they hit the upper atmosphere they’ll re-enter,” said Andrew Kerr from the College of Southern Nevada Planetarium.
The Chinese rocket was called Chang Zheng-7 and reached Earth around 9:45 Pacific Time. The spacecraft was launched on the 25th of June, and it stayed one month before entering the atmosphere again. Its speed was of 18,000 mph.
The location was determined to be 150 miles south Lake Havasu, Arizona.
Chang Zheng-7, or the Long March, was used in 70% of the Chinese launches. The June cargo involved a crew capsule, a CubeSat, two media satellites and on the experimental device to remove space debris, Aolong 1. Also called the Roaming Dragon, Aolong 1 will detect debris from space, capture it and then launch it into the atmosphere of the Earth.
Even if there was no danger or UFOs involved in the lights seen in the sky of Los Angeles, the real cause of the flames, the Long March-7 rocket might still be a matter of concern as the Chinese army had attempted several times to use space science in a military purpose.
Image Source: Wikipedia
