Neither a French missile, nor an Elon Musk satellite, was “one car in a million”

The skies are increasingly monitored for possible dangerous meteorites. And there are also more and more artificial objects sent from Earth in the form of rockets and thousands of satellites. A combination that ends up generating scares and confusion, as happened this weekend in Spain. On Friday the 29th, one minute before midnight, a light crossed the skies of the eastern peninsula, leaving some spectacular videos in its wake. As always happens with these flashes, the specialists from the Bolide and Meteorite Research Network (associated with the CSIC) set out to find an explanation: “We opted for a ballistic missile,” they tweeted at 8:35 hours of the morning of Saturday the 30th. The long trajectory of the object and the absence of echoes of disintegration of the space rock when it collided with the atmosphere led us to believe that it was an artifact of terrestrial origin. Late on Sunday, new calculations of the car's speed They rule out that and other options and they point out that it was surely an asteroid with a “highly unusual” trajectory, in the words of the Network coordinator, astrophysicist Josep Maria Trigo: “It is one in a million bolide.”

Trigo now regrets, in a telephone conversation, his initial failure: “I'm sorry for having mentioned the missile, with everything we had I made the mistake of mentioning it. “It tastes pretty bad to me, because it caused alarm after 35 years of dedicating myself to this.” The researcher from the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) says that on November 18 they detected a ballistic missile in the Bay of Biscay, which “entered Spanish airspace and emerged from a French military base.” Hence they suspected that this new object, which flew over France, Girona and the Balearic Islands, in that order, could have the same origin. On Saturday late afternoon, the CSIC sent a note to the media, ruling out the missile option, “after a team of ICE-CSIC researchers has analyzed in detail the images and measurements taken of the car.”

“The preliminary data obtained so far make us choose that the bolide was produced by the re-entry of an artificial object in Earth orbit,” Trigo pointed out in that note. That is, it could be a satellite falling back to Earth. Two hours before the CSIC note, while the media reported the hypothesis of the French ballistic missile, the German Air Force was quick to deny that version. on social network. She did it in response to a tweet from the newspaper The world: “According to our Space Situation Knowledge Center, this is the re-entry of a StarLink satellite 😉.” The German ambassador to Spain, Maria Margarete Gosse, he insisted from his official account in this option: it would actually be one of the thousands of satellites that Elon Musk's company has put into orbit in recent years.

Last night some of the leading specialists in the trajectories of space objects denied that possibility. “Just checked all Starlinks in orbit with perigee below 300 km on March 29. None of them coincide in geographic position or general location of the orbital plane with the Spanish sighting,” he stated. Marco Langbroek, reference on the subject, from the Technical University of Delft. Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, confirmed: “I see no evidence that a Starlink re-entered at that time.” Trigo points out that there was one before and one after, none that day at that time and, above all, the “path is not consistent with the re-entry of a Starlink satellite.”

“I think the final verdict will be that it was a small fragment of an asteroid that entered the Earth's atmosphere at a very low angle and at low speed. These objects are difficult to distinguish from satellite reentries (a good determination of the speed will solve it, but it takes time),” added Lambroek in his X account. It is the option that Trigo now defends, with the calculations of the speed of the object, too fast to be an artifact that was in Earth orbit: “It passes at 14 or 15 kilometers per second with a high inclination. It is something that comes from space.” Although he does not dare to confirm it, everything indicates that it is a skimming car, that is, an asteroid that kisses the atmosphere tangentially, which does not disintegrate or fall, and passes by. “In the videos you can see that the car goes on and on and on,” says Trigo. The Network that coordinates explains in X: “That does not mean that there could not be an unforeseen re-entry (…). Some eccentric reentries can reach the atmosphere at 10 km/s, although most do so at a few km/s.”

The astrophysicist estimates that it must have been an object “well under a meter” in size and probably metallic, which is why it did not disintegrate when tearing through the atmosphere, creating the usual trail and the echo of that fragmentation. Space surveillance stations did not pick up those signals, which caused the initial confusion.

Until recently, even during the space race, a celestial flash was almost certainly a rock coming from space and colliding with Earth's atmosphere. But in recent years scares in heaven have multiplied. Sightings of Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomena occur in different parts of the planet, generally due to the extraordinary activity of Starlink satellites and SpaceX rockets, both Elon Musk companies. The rockets, on their re-entry, cause spectacular images of spirals and luminous jellyfish that scare and fascinate.

And sometimes the scare is justified. In November 2022, China dropped a gigantic rocket module on Earth, out of control, after one of its launches. The trajectory of that fall, added to the significant dimensions of the object (a 20-ton cylinder, 30 meters long and 5 meters wide), forced the Spanish authorities to order all planes that intended to fly in the area to stay on the ground. Peninsula. NASA condemned the “unnecessary risks” caused by China, although the monumental piece of space junk ended up falling into the Pacific.

You can follow SUBJECT in Facebook, x and instagramor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.