A SpaceX rocket had reentered the atmosphere. A massive chunk of the Crew-5 Dragon burned and seemingly appeared like a meteor shower when it fell into Colorado.
SpaceX Crew-5 Dragon's Reentry
A stunning display of shooting stars fell on Colorado Thursday night, and the residents witnessed it. However, it wasn't a meteor shower because the cluster of streaming lights that fell to Earth was caused by a piece of a SpaceX craft reentering the atmosphere and catching fire, Newsweek reported.
A photo of the shower taken from Crestone, Colorado, by photographer Mike Lewinski was published in spaceweather.com's Realtime Image Gallery. In the caption, he said it was captured in time-lapse and was a two-frame composite. It was bright enough to illuminate the foreground on his camera, which is looking in the opposite direction.
He shared the images on the r/Colorado subreddit.
A piece of the SpaceX Dragon crew capsule Endurance, which brought four astronauts from the International Space Station back to Earth on March 11, was the source of the debris. Just before it hit the Earth's atmosphere, the capsule expelled a piece of disposable hardware used to store solar arrays, known as the "trunk," which propelled it into orbit.
Though it only remained in orbit for about a month and a half, Colorado saw this piece of space junk crash back to Earth.
The reentry of SpaceX's Crew-5 Dragon trunk took place on Thursday, April 27, according to a statement from 11 News and confirmed overnight by the 18th Space Defense Squadron. When Crew-5 astronauts returned to Earth from the International Space Station on March 11, 2023, this equipment was ostensibly jettisoned from the Dragon spacecraft. To improve orbital hardware demise models, NASA and SpaceX are collaborating closely. Both organizations are dedicated to safe commercial crew missions.
An image of the trunk's reentry route, tweeted by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, shows the item traveling over Phoenix, Arizona, the Great Sand Dunes National Park, and Colorado Springs.
On Mar 12 the @SpaceX Crew-5 Dragon jettisoned its trunk section into a 300 x 410 km orbit. The trunk, object 55840, made an uncontrolled reentry last night at 0852 UTC = 0252 MDT = 0152 MST on a track from Phoenix to Colorado Springs. The reentry breakup was widely seen. pic.twitter.com/I1Ill9TNEP
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) April 27, 2023
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NASA Satellite Also Made a Reentry
Spacecraft and satellites doing a reentry to Earth are not unusual. In a previous report from Science Times, a 600-pound dead NASA satellite, Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI), also returned to the planet last week.
McDowell wasn't bothered about the reentry because it's common for small craft to fall back to Earth. However, the US space agency rarely announces it.
According to New York Post, RHESSI burned up over the Sahara Desert. It was expected to plummet before it crashed into the ground.
NASA officials said they received no injury reports about the reentry over Sundan early Thursday morning. The agency had already said that the risk of reentry harming anyone is low, approximately 1 in 2467.
RHESSI was launched on Feb. 5, 2002, atop a Pegasus XL rocket from Orbital Sciences Corporation. Its goal was to take photos of high-energy electrons carrying a significant portion of the energy released in solar flares. RHESSI has been floating space for over 20 years and was decommissioned in 2018.
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