Huge debris from SpaceX spacecraft hit farms in Australia

At the end of July 2022, the aerospace agencyNASA has criticized China due to the fact that the wreckage of the carrier rocket "Changzheng-5B" fell in the Indian Ocean. According to the head of the organization Bill Nelson (Bill Nelson), in the event of a fall of dangerous objects, mission leaders are required to warn the scientific community about this, because it is important for the safety of people. As it turned out, not only fragments of Chinese-made rockets fall to Earth. The other day it became known that Australian farmers recently discovered on their territories 3-meter fragments of metal blackened from high temperatures. The experts who arrived at the scene found out that these were parts of the American SpaceX space rocket that did not have time to burn out in the Earth's atmosphere. Fragments of spacecraft are falling more and more often, do they really pose a greater danger than previously thought?

A fragment of the SpaceX spacecraft that fell on an Australian farm

The wreckage of a SpaceX spacecraft

Sheep farmer Mick Meiners(Mick Miners) discovered charred metal on the snowy mountains of New South Wales on July 25th. According to him, at first he did not know what to do and, moreover, had no idea what it was. It turned out that his neighbor Jock Wallace also asked the same questions - he also discovered a metal of unknown origin on his lands. After that, it became known that a little earlier, piles of blackened metal were found in the Australian region of Munbach.

The first fragment of the spacecraft

Places of discovery of mysterious objects visitedastrophysicist Brad Tucker. He immediately expressed confidence that fragments of a SpaceX spacecraft had fallen on the farmlands - most likely it was the Crew Dragon. There is no particular doubt about this, because in the first half of July, the inhabitants of Australia heard a loud bang and saw a burning object in the sky. Experts were able to fix the trajectory of the object and recognized it as one of Elon Musk's spacecraft. Apparently, it spent some time in near-earth orbit as space debris and then began to burn in the earth's atmosphere. Regular readers of our site already know that sometimes objects do not burn out completely - this is just one of such cases.

The second fragment of the spaceship

News outlets have contactedSpaceX for comment, but company representatives have not confirmed that this is the wreckage of their apparatus - they simply remained silent. However, researcher Brad Tucker believes that sooner or later SpaceX or the US authorities will confirm the information and huge pieces of metal will leave the farms. Where the piles of metal are now is unknown - most likely, they lie in place, because we are talking about giant fragments of space debris up to 3 meters high. At the time of the fall, they were clearly very hot, because the grass under them is also black.

It was previously thought that the probability of falling space debris on a person is very small, but scientists may be wrong

According to the calculations of experts from the aerospaceAccording to the NASA agency, the probability of being hit by space debris is 1 in 3200. And recently, another group of scientists using mathematical calculations found that the probability of an object from space hitting a person is 10% in one decade. Based on all this, we can conclude that space debris practically does not pose a danger to human life.

It is possible that in the future space debris will fall on people more often.

But how to explain the fact that since 2020 the fallfragments of spacecraft on land occur more frequently? There is no exact data, but it may well be that the increase in such cases is associated with an increase in the number of garbage objects in Earth orbit. In an article about the danger of space debris for astronauts, we already mentioned that at the moment about 28 million pieces of space debris larger than 1 millimeter and 34 thousand fragments larger than 10 centimeters are flying in orbit. Recently, China has also entered the race for space exploration - there are more launches and, consequently, more garbage.

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