“Shooting stars? Debris? Anyone else see this in Seattle just now?”
Stunned onlookers filmed the skies over Portland and Seattle in awe on Thursday, as a strange stream of bright lights filled the night sky.
But rather than a rogue meteor or firework-spewing plane, state weather services and a Harvard astronomer concluded that the lights appear to be space debris from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, resulting from a Starlink satellite launch in March.
The National Weather Service’s bureau in Portland said it had been getting “a number of calls” about the event. Although the account wrote it was “waiting for more information from official sources,” it pointed to a Tweet by astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who is affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
McDowell concluded that a Falcon 9 rocket from a Starlink satellite launch in early March (he estimated March 4, which sent up 60 satellites) had “failed to make a deorbit burn and is now reentering after 22 days in orbit.” A deorbit burn involves a short firing of orbital manoeuvring system engines to slow a spacecraft’s speed enough to begin its descent to Earth.
We have been getting a number of calls about this! This looks like what we have seen in all of your videos. Not official, but this fits the bill. https://t.co/UX3SMtYwP0
— NWS Portland (@NWSPortland) March 26, 2021
Over in Seattle, the NWS team was also drawing conclusions in the early hours. While noting it was waiting for official confirmation, the weather service said, “The widely reported bright objects in the sky were the debris from a Falcon 9 rocket in second stage that did not successfully have a deorbit burn.” NWS also stated that it did not expect to see ground impact from the object.
Based on the observed video, this looks more likely than a bolide meteor or similar object as they would be moving far faster on impact with our atmosphere. There are NO expected impacts on the ground in our region at this time. More info will be posted as it becomes available.
— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) March 26, 2021
SpaceX regularly deploys its partially reusable Falcon 9 rockets to carry satellites, including the ongoing launches of Starlink satellites for Musk’s ambitious internet service.
NASA, SpaceX, or CEO Elon Musk has not yet publicly responded to the event — although plenty of people posting on Twitter tagged him. Mashable has reached out to SpaceX for comment.
McDowell has meanwhile been tweeting more conclusions on the event, explaining that a re-entry like this one happening over Seattle happens at about 60 kilometres (40 miles) up, above the level of airplanes, and that the object’s predicted re-entry time and location would have been uncertain due to both the speed at which it’s travelling and a headwind in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
4) But remember it’s going 17000 mph, so a 5 hour time uncertainty means an 85,000 mile (53000 km) location uncertainty. That’s more that one entire loop around the Earth. That’s why we couldn’t tell in advance that it would be the Seattle area that would see the reentry.
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) March 26, 2021
Updated plot of the altitude vs time for the objects from the Starlink V1.0-L17 launch of Mar 4, showing the orbital decay of the second stage (just reentered) and the deployment rods (down in next week or so) as the Starlink payloads use ion thrusters to raise orbit pic.twitter.com/nr6mMZMWcI
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) March 26, 2021
Seattle NWS, still awake in the early hours, long after the mysterious lights had gone, posted an image of the Orion Nebula (an enormous cloud of gas and dust that sits in the Milky Way with us, visible to the naked eye from Earth) in the sky — but it was also upstaged by a satellite.
