'It's predictable that the thing is going to decay but exactly how and where will the debris. The debris falling from the sky Thursday night was somewhat expected because it had been up for a couple of weeks, slowly decaying in its orbit. Space Command have developed and maintained a catalogue of the anthropogenic space objects and try their best to predict when two of these objects might come close to each other to collide, and warn people. So whenever they die, they rain down on the space stations, Jah said.īut is it possible to predict these events beforehand? You could just say that these unscheduled events are part of the statistics,' he added.Īccording to him, there are currently over 26,000 anthropogenic objects in space, of which about 3,500 are currently serving a purpose while everything else is garbage.Ī lot of the satellites that are put into earth's orbits are orbiting above the earth's space stations. 'The business of conducting space operations, by and large, it's actually quite successful and these things do happen and it's statistical. (Reuters)Įvents like these educate the public on the realities of doing business in space and Jah says it's surprising that equipment doesn't fail more often. Jah added that there’s no way to really predict where the debris and decaying materials from rockets might re-enter. Given that most of the earth is covered by water and the largest body of that is the Pacific, things that survive reentry, by and large, basically pollute the ocean,' he said. 'There's so much uncertainty when things hit the atmosphere. Jah said larger objects are more likely to not fully burn up in the atmosphere, especially if the angle of reentry is not steep enough. Moriba Jah, an associate professor in aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, says the rocket was supposed to 'slow itself down in calculated way to force it to re-enter and burn up in the atmosphere.'īecause that controlled, scheduled, manoeuvre did not happen, it was left to mother nature to clean it up which is unpredictable. National Weather Service in Seattle has said there is not expected to be any impact on the ground. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, tweeted that the cause appeared to be the remains of the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket used by SpaceX to launch a satellite earlier this month.

And click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live.Duration 0:57 Featured VideoObservers in B.C., Washington state and Oregon captured what is believed to be the remains of a rocket used by SpaceX.

Read: Recall alert: Ice cream products recalled in around 40 states due to possible listeria contaminationĬlick here to download our free news, weather and smart TV apps. Stay tuned to Channel 9 for live launch coverage. Read: Florida suspends school choice scholarships for schools with ‘ties to Chinese Communist Party’įollowing stage separation, the first stage will land on the Just Read the Instructions droneship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. This is the 17th flight for the first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched GPS III-3, Turksat 5A, Transporter-2, Intelsat G-33/G-34, Transporter-6, and 11 Starlink missions. Read: Police: Suspect arrested in Orlando apartment complex shooting that left 1 dead, 3 injured If the launch doesn’t happen in those windows, SpaceX will have other launch opportunities on Sunday evening between 8:41 p.m. with additional launch windows scheduled from 9:57 p.m. The launch is scheduled for Saturday, Sept. The Falcon 9 rocket will launch from Space Launch Complex 40 and will carry 22 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit.

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