It’s been more than a week since the first reports of a “glowing metal ring” falling from the sky and crashing near a remote village in Kenya.
The object weighed 1,100 pounds and was more than 8 feet in diameter when it landed on Dec. 30, according to the Kenyan Space Agency. A few days later, the space agency confidently reported that the object was a piece of space debris. He said it was a ring that was separated from the rocket. “Such objects are typically designed to burn up on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere or crash into unoccupied areas such as oceans,” the space agency told The New York Times.
Since those initial reports appeared in the Western media, a small group of dedicated space trackers have been using open-source data to pinpoint exactly which space object crashed into Kenya. So far, they have not been able to identify the rocket launch to which the big ring can be attributed.
Now, some space trackers believe that the object may not have come from space at all.
Did it really come from space?
Space is getting increasingly crowded, but large chunks of metal from rockets don’t usually fly around Earth undetected and untracked.
“It has been suggested that the ring is space debris, but the evidence is marginal,” writes Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell is highly regarded for his analysis of space objects. “The most likely space-related possibility is the reentry of the SYLDA adapter from Ariane flight V184, object 33155,” he wrote.
Another prominent space tracker, Marco Langbroek, believes the ring came from space, so he further investigated objects that may have returned to Kenya when the object was discovered. In a blog post written Wednesday, he noted that in addition to the metal ring, other pieces consistent with space debris — including materials that resemble carbon coating and insulating foil — were found several kilometers away from the ring.
Like McDowell, Langbroek concluded that the most likely source for the object was the Ariane V launch that took place in July 2008, in which the European rocket launched two satellites into geosynchronous transfer orbit.
The Ariane V rocket was a rather unique rocket in that it was designed with the capacity to launch two medium-sized satellites into geostationary transfer orbit, a destination much more popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s than it is today. To accommodate both satellites, a SYstème de Lancement Double Ariane (SYLDA) shell was placed on the lower satellite to support the installation of the second satellite on top. During the 2008 launch, the SYLDA shell was launched into a 1.6° inclined geosynchronous transfer orbit, Langbroek said.
Could it have come from a European missile?
Over the years, the object has been tracked by the US military, which maintains a database of space objects so active spacecraft can avoid collisions. Due to the lack of tracking stations near the equator, this object is observed only periodically. Its last observation was on Dec. 23, when it was in a highly elliptical orbit, reaching its perigee just 90 miles (146 kilometers) from Earth, Longbrook said. This was a week before an object hit Kenya.
Based on his modeling of the possible reentry of the SYLDA shell, Langbrook believes it is possible that the European object may have landed in Kenya when it was observed entering.
However, an anonymous X user account using the handle DutchSpace, who has provided reliable information about Ariane launch vehicles in the past despite being anonymous, posted a thread suggesting that the ring could not be part of the SYLDA shell. With the images and documentation, it seems clear that neither the diameter nor the mass of the SYLDA component matches the ring found in Kenya.
Additionally, Arianespace officials told Le Parisien newspaper on Thursday that they do not believe the space debris is related to the Ariane V rocket. Basically, if the ring doesn’t fit, you have to acquit yourself.
so what was it
This story appeared first Ars Technica.
