On Tuesday October, 23 thousands of people in Arizona, Nevada and California saw a large fireball fly across the sky.
The event happened a little after sundown when people started calling local police after seeing the Armageddon like object flying across the sky suggesting all kinds of odd things it may be.
It turns out that it wasn’t a giant shooting star, ET coming for a visit, or Santa coming early. It was in fact, a Russian SL-4 rocket body that had fallen from orbit.
Space junk falling to Earth is actually very common, but is not always so noticeable.
“This was an object that we were tracking and we knew was going to come and reenter the atmosphere,” said Maj. Matt Miller, a spokesman for U.S. Strategic Command.
“There are millions of small bits of space junk in orbit about the Earth,” said Don Yeomans, manager for NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.
Rocket boosters can cause these large fireballs, but the vast majority of man-made objects causing fireballs are about centimeter-sized. Therefore, you generally don’t realize that the objects are regularly raining down on you.
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