[imagesource: Twitter/@itumelengmakgae]
On Sunday night, the sky above Johannesburg shone bright with strange lights for a moment, leaving many residents wondering what the Uranus was going on.
South Africa’s skies have been frequently littered with strange space phenomena that turned out to be plummeting space junk from various rockets.
There was that time the re-entry of the SL-4 rocket booster from the Roscosmos Soyuz 2.1a rocket had KwaZulu-Natal residents thinking they had witnessed a meteor shower.
Or that time the upper stage of the Chinese Yuanzheng-1S rocket being deorbited made Jozi residents think the same.
Alas, the surprised and confused exclamations continue to be shared on social media when incredulous spectators see strange lights in the sky.
I mean, I guess you never know.
This past Sunday’s event was thanks to debris from a Russian space rocket falling to earth.
But that didn’t stop people from wondering if it could actually be meteorites, a UFO, or even “South Africa coming under attack”, reported News24:
The person who captured the video can be heard saying: “What is this, what the hell, this is how they are bombing us and it is getting brighter and brighter… It is falling now, it has separated and it’s now two of them.”
We just saw this 😱😱😱 #SouthAfrica nooo pic.twitter.com/0GOWwsaoL4
— Roro (@itumelengmakgae) June 5, 2022
@itumelengmakgae here’s 2nd part of the video :thread pic.twitter.com/GFBtHwsE3I
— Thuli (@mabenathuli20) June 5, 2022
The Russian rocket theory has been confirmed by Professor Andrew Chen of Witwatersrand University’s school of physics:
“The object seen on Sunday evening was debris from a Russian SL-4 rocket upper stage, since it breaks up into pieces and burns up in the atmosphere.”
It was also confirmed as such by Carmel Ives, vice-chairperson of the Astronomical Society of SA (ASSA) via TimesLIVE:
“You can tell it is space junk because of the speed at which it moves.
“It is space junk rather than a meteor as it is moving slowly, at 20,000 to 30,000km/h, and breaks up into several pieces. Meteors travel at 70,000 to 80,000km/h and appear as a single streak,” she said.
ASSA shared this image on Facebook:
Chen said that space junk is generally nothing to worry about as there are systems in place to direct the debris into the ocean.
Since most of the world is made up of ocean, space junk hardly ever lands on solid ground.
