The Shining Metal Ring crashed to the ground. Nobody Knows Where It Came From

It’s been more than a week since news first emerged of a ‘glowing ring of metal’ falling from the sky and crashing near a remote Kenyan village.

The object weighed 1,100 pounds and was more than 8 feet in diameter when measured after landing on Dec. 30, according to the Kenya Space Agency. A few days later, the space agency confirmed that the object was a piece of space debris. , said it was a ring separated from the rocket. “Such objects are typically designed to burn up upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere or fall over empty areas such as oceans,” the space agency said. He told “The New York Times”..

After those initial reports were published in the Western media, a small group of dedicated space trackers used open source data to try to determine exactly which space object had landed in Kenya. So far, they have not been able to identify the rocket launch to which the large ring could be attributed.

Now some space watchers believe the object may not have come from space at all.

Did it really come from space?

Space is getting tighter, but large chunks of metal from rockets generally don’t fly into Earth’s orbit undetected and untracked.

“Ring claimed to be space debris, but evidence marginal” he wrote Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell is highly regarded for his analysis of space objects. “The most likely space-related possibility is that the SYLDA adapter from the Ariane V184 flight re-entered object 33155. However, I’m not entirely convinced that the ring is space debris at all,” he said.

Another prominent space watcher, Marco Langbroek, finds it plausible that the ring came from space, so he investigated the returnable objects in greater detail during his discovery of the object in Kenya. In blog post written on wednesday he noted that in addition to the metal ring, other fragments that appeared to be space debris, including carbon coating and material that appeared to be insulating foil, were found several kilometers from the ring.

Like McDowell, Langbroek concluded that it was the most likely source for the object Ariane V launch It happened in July 2008, when a European rocket launched two satellites into geosynchronous transfer orbit.

The Ariane V rocket was a rather unique rocket in that it was designed with the ability to launch two medium-sized satellites into geostationary transfer orbit, a more popular destination in the late 1990s and early 2000s than it is today. To accommodate both satellites, a SYSTème de Lancement Double Ariane (SYLDA) missile was placed on top of the lower satellite to support the mounting of the second satellite on top. During its 2008 launch, this SYLDA shell was launched into a geosynchronous transfer orbit with an inclination of 1.6 degrees, Langbroek said.

Could it come from a European rocket?

Over the years, the facility has been monitored by the US military, and it maintains a database of space objects so that active spacecraft can avoid collisions. Due to the lack of monitoring stations near the equator, this object is observed only periodically. According to Langbroek, its last observation occurred on December 23, when it reached perigee just 90 miles (146 km) from Earth while in a highly elliptical orbit. This was a week before an object landed in Kenya.

Based on modeling the possible reentry of the SYLDA crust, Langbroek believes that the European object could have fallen into Kenya when its entry was observed.

However, an anonymous X account using the handle DutchSpace, which has provided reliable information about Ariane launch vehicles in the past despite its anonymity, Thread posted this suggests that this ring could not have been part of the SYLDA shell. It is clear from the images and documents that neither the diameter nor the mass of the SYLDA component matches the ring found in Kenya.

In addition, Arianespace officials This was reported by Le Parisien newspaper On Thursday, they did not believe the space debris was related to the Ariane V rocket. In fact, if the ring doesn’t fit, you have to excuse it.

And what was it?

This story appeared first Ars Technica.