A piece of space debris appears to have arrived hot and heavy in Australia.
On Saturday (October 18), miners discovered a mysterious smoking slab near a remote access road, approximately 30 kilometers east of Newman, Western Australia. Western Australian Police attended the scene and took note of the incident, as did the Australian Space Agencywhich explained that it would carry out “a more in-depth technical analysis to identify its origin”.
But a first look at the mysterious debris suggests it’s made of carbon fiber and may be part of a rocket.
In a blog post On Monday (October 20), space analyst Marco Langbroek said the object resembled an overwrapped composite pressure vessel (COPV). COPVs contain high-pressure gases and liquids inside rockets and often survive re-entry. Earth’s atmosphere.
“It would have burned when it was discovered, which is unusual and against all expectations for space debris” Langbroek wrote in Monday’s update. This suggests a very recent impact, if it was indeed space debris, he added.
Langbroek thinks it’s likely orbital debris, and he named a promising candidate source: the upper stage of a Chinese spacecraft. Jielong3 (also known as Smart Dragon 3), which fell back to Earth on October 18.
“It could actually be (a significant part of) the upper stage itself, given the large size suggested by the photos (and also given that the upper stage of Jielong 3 would be a solid fuel stage),” wrote Langbroek, an astrodynamics and space mission specialist who is on the faculty of aerospace engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
It screened a handful of candidate space objects that could be linked to the trash.
“Of these, only one was in an orbit that would correspond to the pass near Newman in the early hours of October 18, China’s Jielong 3 stage in a polar orbit inclined at 97.6 degrees,” he wrote. He added that the rocket stage was approaching from the north-northeast towards the south-southwest.
“Not much information is known about the components of Jielong 3 in terms of size and mass,” Langbroek said, but he pointed out that this object is a good contender for the source of the Outback object.
