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A massive piece of space junk recently smashed into a village in Kenya. The 1,100-pound (500 kilograms) ring of metal likely came from a rocket, though its exact origins are still unknown, Kenyan officials say.
Low-earth orbit is getting increasingly congested. There are currently more than170 million pieces of debris wider than 0.004 inches (1 millimeter) from rockets, space shuttles, defunct satellites and other space operations orbiting our planet. Some of that space junk simply burns up in Earth's atmosphere. But the pieces that don't are beginning to pose problems.
On Monday (Dec. 30), a small Kenyan village learned this the hard way when the half-ton metal ring crashed into a thicket, startling locals. "I was looking after my cow and I heard a loud bang," Joseph Mutua, a resident of Mukuku village, which lies southeast of the capital Nairobi, told Kenyan news station NTV. "I could not see any smoke in the clouds. I went by the roadside to check if there was any car accident, but there wasn't any collision.
Massive piece of space junk crashes into village in Kenya — and officials still have no idea where it came from
A 1,100-pound metal ring from a rocket smashed in to a Kenyan village, where it startled residents and flattened trees
“Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans,” the space agency said, describing the incident as “an isolated case.”
For residents of Makueni County, southeast of Kenya’s capital Nairobi, the space junk’s landing was quite a shock on an otherwise quiet Monday afternoon.
“I was looking after my cow and I heard a loud bang,” Joseph Mutua, a local resident, told Kenya’s NTV news channel. “I looked around; I could not see any smoke in the clouds. I went by the roadside to check if there was any car accident, but there wasn’t any collision.”
A Half-Ton Piece of Space Junk Falls Onto a Village in Kenya
No one was hurt by the object, believed to be part of a launch rocket. Experts say the frequency of such incidents is increasing as the amount of debris in orbit around the Earth grows dramatically.
