It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, they are: parts of a SpaceX rocket?
Unidentified objects that illuminated Oregon’s night sky in Canada on Thursday appear to be remnants of Falcon 9 from a launch three weeks ago.
Observers in the Pacific Northwest noticed bright streaks of light raining slowly upward just before 9 p.m. local time and midnight ET on Thursday. Several posted photos and videos of the celestial spectacle, wondering if it was a meteor shower or worrying about whether it was something more sinister, like a plane crash.
What was it, then?
The unofficial explanation of astronomers and meteorologists is that they were the remains of harmless rockets. SpaceX, which was founded by Tesla TSLA,
CEO Elon Musk, launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida just over three weeks ago to carry 60 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit. It appears that the upper end or second stage of the rocket, which should re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn within one or two orbits after launch, did not complete its desorbital combustion as expected. .
“Three weeks ago I was expecting it to fall, and we were lucky and it went overboard,” University of Washington astronomer James Davenport told KINGS, an affiliate of the local NBC network.
Fellow astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics also identified it as remnants of the Falcon 9 rocket. that “his re-entry was observed from the Seattle area.”
This caused many fans to share their own images of the unexpected light show a thread growing under its place. Many described it as “amazing,” although some expressed their first concern that it was a more serious incident such as the operation of an airplane.
The Seattle National Meteorological Service also identified the debris as probable from the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket. securing followers on Twitter that “there are no expected impacts on the ground in our region at this time.”
Watch some of the awesome videos below.
SpaceX has not taken responsibility for the long-awaited light show, and representatives from NASA’s SpaceX media relations department were not immediately available for comment.