It has been more than a week since reports first emerged about a “shining metal ring” that fell from the sky and crashed near a remote village in Kenya.
According to the Kenya Space Agency, the object weighed 1,100 pounds and had a diameter of more than 8 feet when it was measured after its landing on December 30. A couple of 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 typically designed to burn upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall into unoccupied areas, such as the oceans,” the space agency says. told the New York Times.
Since those initial reports were published in Western media, a small group of dedicated space trackers have been using open source data to try to identify precisely which space object fell in Kenya. So far they have not been able to identify the rocket launch to which the large ring can be attributed.
Now, some space trackers believe the object may not have come from space at all.
Did it really come from space?
Space is becoming increasingly crowded, but large chunks of metal from rockets generally don’t fly through Earth’s orbit undetected and untracked.
“It has been suggested that the ring is 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 re-entry of the SYLDA adapter from Ariane flight V184, object 33155. However, I am not entirely convinced that the ring is space debris,” he wrote.
Another prominent space tracker, Marco Langbroek, believes it is plausible that the ring came from space, so he further investigated objects that may have returned around the time of the object’s discovery in Kenya. In a blog post written on Wednesday He noted that in addition to the metal ring, other fragments that appeared consistent with space debris, including material that looks like a carbon envelope and a sheet of insulation, were found several kilometers away from the ring.
Like McDowell, Langbroek concluded that the most likely source of the object was an Ariane V release which took place in July 2008, in which the European rocket launched two satellites into a geosynchronous transfer orbit.
The Ariane V rocket was a rather unique rocket in that it was designed with the ability to launch two medium-sized satellites into geostationary transfer orbit, a destination much more popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s than it is today. To accommodate both satellites, a SYstème de Lancement Double Ariane (SYLDA) housing was placed over the lower satellite to support the mounting of a second satellite above it. During launch in 2008, this SYLDA projectile was ejected into a 1.6-degree inclined geosynchronous transfer orbit, Langbroek said.
Could it have 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 monitoring stations near the equator, this object is only observed periodically. According to Langbroek, its last observation took place on December 23, when it was in a highly elliptical orbit, reaching perigee just 90 miles (146 km) from Earth. This was a week before an object crashed in Kenya.
Based on his modeling of the possible re-entry of the SYLDA shell, Langbroek believes that the European object may have landed in Kenya around the time its entry was observed.
However, an anonymous X account using the handle DutchSpace, which despite anonymity has provided reliable information about Ariane launch vehicles in the past, posted a thread This indicates that this ring could not have been part of SYLDA’s shell. With images and documentation, it seems clear that neither the diameter nor the mass of the SYLDA component matches the ring found in Kenya.
Additionally, Arianespace officials he told the newspaper Le Parisien on Thursday that they do not believe space debris is associated with the Ariane V rocket. Essentially, if the ring doesn’t fit, you must acquit.
So what was it?
This story originally appeared on Ars Technique.