It’s been more than a week since reports first emerged of a “glowing ring of metal” falling from the sky and crashing near a remote village in Kenya. According to the Kenyan Space Agency, the object weighed 1,100 kilograms and was more than 8 feet in diameter when measured after landing in 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 separated from the rocket. “Such objects are typically designed to burn up when they re-enter Earth’s atmosphere or fall into uninhabited areas, such as the ocean,” the space agency told the New York Times. dedicated space trackers have used open source data to try to accurately identify space objects that fell in Kenya. So far, they have not been able to identify a rocket launch that can be called a large ring. Now, some space trackers believe the object may not have come from space. , but large chunks of metal from rockets generally don’t fly into Earth’s orbit undetected and untracked. an astrophysicist works 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 the Ariane V184 flight, object 33155. However, I am not convinced that the ring is space debris,” he wrote. Another famous space tracker, Marco Langbroek, believed that the rings came from space, so he investigated more about the objects that may have gone back in time. discovery of objects in Kenya. In a blog post written Wednesday, he noted that in addition to the metal ring, other fragments that appeared to be consistent with space debris — including material that looked like carbon wrap and insulating foil — were found several kilometers away from the ring. Like McDowell, Langbroek concluded that the most likely source for the object is the Ariane V launch that took place back in July 2008, in which the European rocket lofted two satellites into a geosynchronous transfer orbit. The Ariane V rocket is a rather unique rocket in that it was designed with the capacity to launch two medium-sized satellites into geostationary transfer orbit, a goal that was more popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s than it is today. To accommodate the two satellites, the SYstème de Lancement Double Ariane (SYLDA) shell was placed on the bottom of the satellite to support the mounting of the second satellite on top. During its launch in 2008, the SYLDA shell was launched into a 1.6-degree geosynchronous transfer orbit, Langbroek said. 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, the last observation was made on December 23, when it was in a highly elliptical orbit, reaching perigee only 90 miles (146 km) from Earth. This was a week before the object hit Kenya. Based on his model of the possible re-entry of the SYLDA shell, Langbroek believes that the European object could have landed in Kenya when the entry was observed. However, the anonymous X Account using the handle DutchSpace, which despite its anonymity has provided reliable information about the Ariane launch vehicle in the past, posted a thread indicating that this ring could not be part of the SYLDA shell. With the pictures and documentation, it seems clear that neither the diameter nor the mass of the SYLDA components match the rings found in Kenya. In addition, Arianespace officials told the newspaper Le Parisien on Thursday that they do not believe that the space debris is associated with the Ariane V rocket. Basically, if the ring doesn’t fit, you have to free it. So what is it? This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
