We already have an explanation for the phenomenon that crossed the sky of Media Spain on Sunday near midnight. And as Okham’s razor dictates, it was the simplest explanation.
Context. Full summer, full heat wave. Around 23:50 on Sunday, with the streets still full and many people on the beach or the pool looking at the sky with the Hope to see some perseipera handful of metal fragments began to shine in the sky.
They soon appear videos from different points of the Peninsula and Balearic Islands. Those flashes had slowly traveled the sky of Media Spain. From the south of Andalusia they saw him on his heads. From as far as Barcelona saw him very low on the horizon.
A Starlink satellite. Specifically, Starlink 30199, launched on July 10, 2023 from California, according to the Astrophysic calculations Jonathan McDowellfamous for documenting all space releases.
The Spacex satellite resent the atmosphere at 23:45 on August 10 and disintegrated over Spain through the provinces of Cádiz, Malaga, Granada and Murcia. According to the CSIC BOLIDS RESEARCH NETWORKcould be seen from Andalusia, Aragon, Castilla-La Mancha, Community of Madrid, Euskadi, La Rioja, Navarra and Region of Murcia.
Mess with the Chinese rocket. At first, McDowell himself had predicted that the remains burned in the atmosphere were those of the fourth stage of the Chinese Jielong-3 rocket, launched by the state-owned state company China Rocket on August 8.
This caused a small stir because Europe and the United States They have stricter regulations so that companies actively extend the rockets in areas far from the population. While it is true that the Chinese rocket stage was orbiting the earth with a low perigee, resent an hour after the Starlink and with another trajectory.
Three resentments a day. Starlink, the SPACEX Satellite Internet Serviceis the most numerous satellite constellation with more than 8,000 satellites, designed with a useful life of five years. Seeing these objects burning in the heavens will be increasingly normal. According to Spacex, they disintegrate completely when they fall on earth, although Effects of vaporized metal on the atmosphere They are still debate.
Other objects, such as pressurized deposits, stages of larger and older and old satellites, do not disintegrate completely. It is estimated that every day they fall on earth three large pieces of space garbage. Some have done it in populated cities, such as the pieces of the Falcon 9 launch They fell in Poland.
Image | SPMN CSIC
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