Just a month after a piece of the ISS pierced the roof of a house in FloridaWe have a new case of falling space debris. This time, no buildings were damaged, as a piece of space debris landed on the fields of a farm in Canada.
A farmer from Saskatchewan, Canada, discovered a heavy piece of burnt metal weighing about 40 kg on his fields and suspected it was space junk. Although, as a layman in the space industry, he did not know for sure.
Local reports of possible space debris reached a group of astronomy professors. They linked the burned fragments to the re-entry of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in February as part of the Axiom-3 mission. The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft undocked from the ISS over the Pacific Ocean west of Ecuador on February 7 and returned the astronaut crew to Earth after landing off the coast of Daytona, Florida, on February 9.
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft consists of a reusable capsule for the crew and a disposable cargo module that is jettisoned before re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. It enters the atmosphere separately and is supposed to burn in its dense layers. This time, however, it hit a farm in Canada a few months after the spacecraft completed its mission.
This is not the first time SpaceX space debris has hit a populated area. In July 2022, another charred piece of metal ended up on farmland in Australia, and it was also suspected to be the remains of a SpaceX Dragon cargo module.
As the space industry continues to grow rapidly, the risks of being struck by spacecraft debris are also increasing. According to ESA, an average of 200 to 400 human-made objects re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere every year. Space agencies generally recognize a probability threshold of 1 in 10,000 for the risk of accidents in a single uncontrolled re-entry.
Source: gizmodo