It’s been more than a week since reports first emerged of a “shining metal ring” falling from the sky and crashing near a remote Kenyan village.
According to the Kenya Space Agency, the object weighed 1,100 pounds and had a diameter of more than 8 feet when measured after landing on December 30. A few days later, the space agency confidently reported that the object was a piece of space debris. , saying it was a ring that separated from a rocket. “These objects are generally designed to burn up when they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall onto unoccupied areas, such as oceans,” the space agency explained. told the New York Times.
Since these first reports were published in Western media, a small group of dedicated space trackers have used open source data to try to identify precisely which space object fell into Kenya. So far, they have not been able to identify which rocket launch the large ring can be attributed to.
Today, some space researchers think the object may not come from space at all.
Does it really come from space?
Space is increasingly crowded, but large chunks of metal from rockets generally don’t fly into Earth’s orbit undetected and untracked.
“It has been suggested that the ring was space debris, but the evidence is marginal,” wrote Jonathan McDowell, astrophysicist working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell is highly regarded for his analysis of space objects. “The most likely space-related possibility is the reentry of the SYLDA adapter from Ariane V184, object 33155. However, I am not at all convinced that the ring is space debris,” he said. he writes.
Another prominent space researcher, Marco Langbroek, believes it is plausible that the ring came from space. He therefore studied in more detail the objects which could have returned to the time of their discovery in Kenya. In a blog post written on Wednesday he noted that in addition to the metal ring, other fragments resembling space debris, including materials resembling carbon casing and insulation foil, were found several kilometers from the ring.
Like McDowell, Langbroek concluded that the most likely source of the object was an Ariane V launch which occurred in July 2008, during which the European rocket placed two satellites into a geosynchronous transfer orbit.
The Ariane V rocket was a fairly unique rocket in that it was designed with the ability to launch two medium-sized satellites into a geostationary transfer orbit, a much more popular destination in the late 1990s and early 2000s than it is today. To accommodate the two satellites, a hull of the Double Ariane Launch System (SYLDA) was placed above the lower satellite to allow the mounting of a second satellite above it. During launch in 2008, this SYLDA shell was ejected into a geosynchronous transfer orbit inclined 1.6 degrees, Langbroek explained.
Could it come from a European rocket?
Over the years, this object has been tracked by the US military, which maintains a database of space objects so that active spacecraft can avoid collisions. Due to the lack of tracking stations near the equator, this object is only observed periodically. According to Langbroek, its last observation was on December 23, when it was in a highly elliptical orbit, reaching a perigee just 90 miles (146 km) from Earth. It was a week before an object crashed into Kenya.
Based on his modeling of the possible re-entry of the SYLDA shell, Langbroek believes it is possible that the European object landed in Kenya at the time its entry was observed.
However, an anonymous X account using the handle DutchSpace, which, despite its anonymity, has provided reliable information on Ariane launchers in the past, posted a topic this indicates that this ring could not have been part of the SYLDA hull. With the images and documentation, it seems clear that neither the diameter nor the mass of the SYLDA component matches the ring found in Kenya.
In addition, Arianespace officials declared to the newspaper Le Parisien As of Thursday, they don’t believe the space debris is associated with the Ariane V rocket. Essentially, if the ring doesn’t fit you, you have to acquit.
So what was it?
This story was originally published on Ars Technica.
