A a great ball of fire crossed the Asturian sky last Sunday. Towards midnight his trail was definitively lost in the Cantabrian Sea. The Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia had followed its trajectory from the north of Morocco, through the Peninsula, from South to North to Asturias, where it disappeared into the sea. Sara had the opportunity to see the object when it had already broken into several fragments, between the towns of Bayo and La Tejera, when she was driving to Grado. It was just after eleven at night and she and the friend who was with her stopped by the side of the road to contemplate those six balls of fire, which Sara refers to as “one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen”. They saw them very close and it seemed that they were going to fall on Grado. Overwhelmed, they first thought of a meteorite, they even feared that the Apocalypse had arrived and then, when the lights faded, contacting a group of experts through social networks, they discovered that it was a communications satellite, a 260 kilo Starlink that the company SpaceX, founded by South African tycoon Elon Musk, and put into orbit on January 24, 2020.
The fireball was recorded by the detectors of the Fireball and Meteor Network of Southwest Europe (SWEMN Network), which operates in different Spanish observatories and works within the framework of the SMART Project, coordinated by the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia ( IAA-CSIC). Its principal investigator, José María Madiedo, reported on Monday that the satellite entered the earth’s atmosphere around eleven o’clock at night and at a speed of about 27,000 kilometers per hour. The sudden friction with the atmosphere at that enormous speed caused it to become incandescent and generated a fireball, which began at an altitude of about 100 kilometers over a point located north of Morocco, almost on the border with Algeria. From there it moved in a northwesterly direction and along its trajectory it was fragmenting, so several fireballs could be seen advancing in parallel. He crossed the entire Peninsula and crossed Asturias, to end its trajectory over the Cantabrian Sea. It is assumed that any fragment of the satellite that had resisted the sudden passage through the Earth’s atmosphere would have fallen into the sea.
Javier de Cos, the director of the University Institute of Space Sciences and Technologies of Asturias, is reassuring about the risk involved in the fall of space debris on Earth. “We should not be afraid, it is very rare and there are measures to avoid it”, he assures, although he admits that “it is not normal or desirable”. What usually happens is that the object disintegrates when it comes into contact with the atmosphere and it is most likely that the remaining fragments fall into the sea or an unpopulated area, which occupy most of the planet’s surface.
De Cos admits that “the scientific community is concerned” about the proliferation of artificial satellites, because of the space debris that is generated and because they make our telescopes less effective and interfere with astronomical observations. “When a company launches a whole train of satellites, some, when they reach their orbit, are no longer operational,” he explains, and for now, he adds, the measures to remedy this situation have not yet been finalized. It is not just about Elon Musk, there are countless aeronautical and information technology companies that have launched satellites without adhering to any regulation, “independently and attending to a competitive race,” he says.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.