Shortly before New Year’s Eve, the inhabitants of a small village located southeast of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, witnessed an unexpected event. A metal ring of approximately 2.5 meters in diameter and a weight close to half a ton fell from the sky on December 30 without causing any injuries.
The object remained scattered among the earth and vegetation, while several curious onlookers approached to observe it. Everything was a mystery. Would it be part of an airplane? Maybe from a spaceship? Local police secured the area until the arrival of a team from the Kenya Space Agency (KSA), which removed the debris for analysis.
Space junk in Kenya
About 48 hours after his intervention, the KSA issued a statement. Preliminary findings from their research suggest that the mysterious object is a separation ring of a space launch vehicle. The agency did not indicate which rocket it corresponded to and described the event as “an isolated case.”
As they explain, these pieces should disintegrate in the Earth’s atmosphere or should fall into uninhabited areas, such as the oceans. Since the aforementioned has not been fulfilled, the authorities have decided to launch an investigation within the framework of international laws that control activities in outer space.
The statement from the Kenya Space Agency
At the time of publishing this article, the piece found in the village of Mukuku has not been associated with a specific rocket. Space debris may be orbiting our planet for several years before re-entering through the atmosphere, so it should not necessarily be related to a recent launch.
What we do know is that space debris is a very real problem. There is more and more launch debris surrounding our planet, increasing the risk of collisions and, consequently, the generation of more debris. Some of them, as we have seen, end up making landfall in an alarming manner.
In the middle of this year we learned that an American family decided to sue NASA after a cylindrical object hit their home in Florida. The cylindrical object turned out to be part of ato platform of old batteries of the International Space Station. It is not the first time something similar has happened.
Images | KSA
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