A large metal ring suspected of being debris from space crashed into a village in southern Kenya on Monday, the country’s space agency said.
A Kenyan Space Agency (Saudi Arabia) said the partially burned metal object measures about 2.5 meters in diameter, weighs about 500 kilograms and is most likely a rocket fragment.
A piece of space debris, possibly from a rocket, has landed in a small Kenyan village.
Handout / Kenya Space Agency
“Such objects are typically 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 in a statement to X on New Year’s Day. , describing the incident as “an isolated incident.” case.”
Residents of Mukuku village in Makueni County, southeast of Kenya’s capital Nairobi, described their shock during crash landing of debris.
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“I was tending to my cow and I heard a loud bang,” Joseph Mutua, a local resident, told Kenyan news channel NTV, according to a translation from the New York Times. “I looked around; I didn’t see any smoke in the clouds. I went to the side of the road to check if there had been a car accident, but there was no collision.
“If the object fell on a farm, it would have been catastrophic,” Mutua continued. “We didn’t know if it was a bomb or something and it fell here.”
Mbooni sub-county police commander Julius Rotich told the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation: the object was still hot when officers arrived Monday, and residents were kept out of the area until it cooled down.
Space debris and space waste constitute a growing problemand last year the European Space Agency estimated that there was more than 13,000 tons of materials in low Earth orbit – about a third of them have been identified as space junk.
The agency estimates that with about 110 new launches each year, plus at least 10 existing satellites and other objects breaking up in space each year, the amount of space debris is expected to increase.
Last year, when a piece of orbital scrap metal was discovered in rural Saskatchewan, the Canadian Space Agency told Global News. takes space debris issue “very seriously” and works to ensure that it poses no “major risk” to the Earth.
Barry Sawchuk found a giant piece of suspected space debris, as seen in this image provided by Sawchuk, in the field of his farm near Ituna, Saskatchewan, on February 28, 2024.
Barry Sawchuk / Handout / The Canadian Press
“With the increase in space traffic, space debris is a growing problem, for which we are all working very closely with national and international partners to find solutions to manage,” said Stéphanie Durand, vice-president of the CSA space program policy, during the conference. time.
According to Saudi Arabia, the debris that fell in Kenya is being investigated under international space law.
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