A MYSTERIOUS and “deadly” space object has plummeted from the sky to land in the canola field of an unsuspecting farmer in Canada.
Barry Sawchuk was driving around his property with his son when the pair spotted the 6.5ft-wide, 88lb charred chunk of fibres and metal.
The father and son were “checking fields to start seeding” near Ituna – a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada – when they discovered what appeared at first to be rubbish.
Barry told Canadian broadcaster CBC: “Originally, we just thought it was garbage until we got closer.”
Upon closer inspection, Barry said he knew “it was space junk right away, but everybody had a chuckle over it”.
Barry said the multiple layers of charred composite fibres and webbing led him to believe it was space debris.
“We came across this object. We thought originally it was just garbage,” he said.
“But I had no idea. I don’t build spaceships for a living. I farm.”
After hearing about the incident, a group of astronomy experts started to dig in to find the source of the junk.
After their small investigation, they were able to establish the charred part belonged to a rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Samantha Lawler from the University of Regina said similar chunks of metal have recently been found in Australia and the US – with one smashing the roof of a Florida home.
She said: “It’s really just luck. If that had hit in the middle of Regina or, yeah, New York City, it very easily could have killed someone.”
The expert added that space launches and rocket re-entries have become way more common in 2024 – and therefore the risk of deaths due to such accidents has drastically increased.
“The aggregate effects of all of these satellites and all of these re-entries need to be considered more carefully. This will be tested in the very near future. It’s really unfortunate how this is evolving,” she added.
What is space debris?
Space debris is an umbrella term for any bit of junk, disused equipment and otherwise, that is currently stuck in Earth’s orbit.
And it has spiralled into a big problem since the dawn of the space age in the 1950s.
There are nearly 30,000 objects bigger than a softball hurtling a few hundred miles above Earth, ten times faster than a bullet.
It poses huge risks to satellites and the International Space Station (ISS), where crew occasionally have to maneuver out of the way of objects hurtling towards them.
In 2016, a fleck of paint managed to chip a window in the ISS because it was moving at such high speeds in Earth’s orbit.
The problem is, it’s not just a space issue – but Earth’s too.
Objects in space undergo a process called orbital decay, which means they orbit closer to Earth as time goes on.
Debris left in orbits below 600km normally fall back to Earth within several years.
While most space debris burns up on reentry to Earth’s atmosphere – there are some bits that don’t.
This is particularly the case with larger objects, like the EP-9 pallet.
A report by US watchdog, the Federal Aviation Authority, published last year warned that space debris that survived the fiery reentry could kill or injure someone on Earth every two years by 2035.
It comes after another object believed to be from the International Space Station (ISS) fell into a Florida home.
Alejandro Otero said the cylindrical object crashed two floors deep into his house and almost hit his son.
The chunk of debris is thought to be from the massive EP-9 equipment pallet that was jettisoned from the ISS for an uncontrolled landing over Earth in early March.
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who roughly tracked the reentry of the debris, initially said the EP-9 equipment pallet reentered on March 8 at 7:29pm UTC over the Gulf of Mexico between Cancun and Cuba.
However, Otero claims the estimations were wrong, having captured the sound of the crash on his Google Nest security cameras.
“Looks like one of those pieces missed Ft Myers and landed in my house in Naples,” Otero wrote in a tweet to McDowell.
“Tore through the roof and went through two floors. Almost hit my son.”
After analysing the claims, McDowell agreed that the timings match up and that it may be “a bit from the reentry of the EP-9 battery pallet.”
Dr. Thomas Hughes is a UK-based scientist and science communicator who makes complex topics accessible to readers. His articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.
