A fiery object seen over Maunakea last week is believed to have been the remains of a falling satellite, astronomers say.
On the night Feb. 8, Big Island some residents reported seeing a series of burning objects streaking through the sky shortly before midnight.
But despite some concerns from social media users, the event has a fairly mundane explanation: a piece of a Chinese rocket launched in 2021 that has been caught in low-Earth orbit ever since.
“It’s just a consequence of using nonreusable rockets,” said Roy Gal, associate astronomer with the Institute for Astronomy, explaining that nonreusable multistage rocket components account for a fair amount of space debris.
This particular piece of debris was previously identified as “Object K” by organizations tracking space debris.
Object K’s final descent was recorded by a camera on the dome of the Subaru Telescope atop Maunakea. The video can be seen here: https://youtu.be/nbeaVtySOJk.
Subaru Senior Staff Astronomer Ichi Tanaka said via email that the camera — the Subaru-Asahi Star Camera — is a fixed instrument that livestreams the sky above Manuakea every night and that the debris happened to pass through the instrument’s field of view by chance.
“One more luck is that our camera has a lot of keen viewers worldwide,” Tanaka wrote in an email to the Tribune-Herald.
“They first sighted this unusual view and notified us via the chat of our YouTube channel.”
Tanaka wrote that the object was estimated to travel nearly 1,500 miles in only five minutes, and marveled at the good luck that the observatory was able to get a good view of the descent.
While the falling object likely burned up entirely in the atmosphere — causing no harm to anyone on the planet’s surface — it does represent a growing hazard for both the aerospace industry and those of us on the ground.
NASA estimates there are more than 25,000 pieces of space debris larger than 10 centimeters (about 4 inches) in diameter in Earth’s orbit, with most of it lower than 2,000 kilometers (about 1,243 miles) above the surface — the same general level at which most satellites orbit the planet.
Gal said the debris in low-Earth orbit also poses a considerable risk to future manned and unmanned space missions.
And in 2022, a roughly 23-ton piece of another Chinese rocket reentered the atmosphere and impacted the planet’s surface after having been released into an unpredictable orbit. It landed in the Pacific Ocean.