On the night of November 9-10, thousands of residents of the southeastern United States reported an unusual sight they witnessed. They observed an unknown flying object that began to disintegrate right before their eyes.
🚨#BREAKING: Thousands of witnesses across the Southwest are reporting an unknown object breaking apart in the sky creating a spectacular display
⁰📌#Unitedstates | #USACurrently, thousands of people across the Southwest, particularly in Oklahoma and Texas, are witnessing… pic.twitter.com/VU0TRxVOPX
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) November 10, 2024
According to eyewitnesses, it was an amazing and even a little frightening sight. Fragments of the celestial guest were flying across the sky, leaving behind a glowing trail of debris visible for many kilometers. All this was accompanied by bright flashes. Some thought they had witnessed a meteor, while others believed it was the military and UFOs.
But the reality was much more prosaic. The source of the celestial show was the Starlink-4682 satellite. It was launched in August 2022, but spent only two years in space before returning to Earth. According to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who specializes in tracking near-Earth objects, the vehicle entered the atmosphere on November 10 at 04:03 a.m. UTC and flew over Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and Oklahoma before finally disintegrating in the skies over Texas.
Events like this are not uncommon. Currently, SpaceX operates a fleet of more than 6,000 active Starlink vehicles. The cost of such mass is that some of the satellites fail prematurely. If SpaceX manages to maintain control, the vehicles are deorbited ahead of schedule. In other cases, the Earth’s atmosphere comes to the rescue. The Starlink vehicles are in low orbits with the expectation that even if they fail, they will not become a long-term part of the space debris population, but will fall to Earth rather quickly. It’s also worth noting, as SpaceX is actively modernizing the vehicles, sometimes the still quite serviceable ones are deorbited early (sometimes in groups) to make room for new ones.
As SpaceX continues to actively expand its Starlink constellation, it means that events similar to the one that U.S. residents witnessed last weekend will happen more and more frequently. We are likely to see similar recordings made in different corners of the globe many more times in the coming years.
Earlier we reported on how satellite selfies revealed a trace of a collision with space debris.
