It is suspected to be a large metal ring debris from space crashed on Monday in a village in southern Kenya, the country’s space agency said.
AND Kenya Space Agency (KSA) official said that the partially burned metal object is about 2.5 meters in diameter, weighs about 500 kilograms and is most likely a fragment of a rocket.
A piece of space debris, possibly from a rocket, has landed in a small Kenyan village.
Brochure / Kenya Space Agency
“Such objects are typically designed to burn up when re-entering Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over uninhabited areas, such as oceans,” the space agency said in a New Year’s statement to X, describing the incident as an “isolated record.”
Residents of Mukuku village in Makueni district, southeast of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, described their shock during the forced landing of debris.
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“I was tending my cow and I heard a loud bang,” Joseph Mutua, a local resident, told Kenyan news channel NTV, according to translation from The New York Times. “I looked around; I couldn’t see any smoke in the clouds. I went by the side of the road to check if there was any traffic accident, but there was no collision.”
“If the object had fallen on the property, it would have been catastrophic,” Mutua continued. “We didn’t know if it was a bomb or what it was and it fell here.”
Mbooni District Police Commander Julius Rotich told the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation the object was still hot when officers arrived Monday, and that residents were kept away from the area until it cooled.
Space debris and space junk are a a growing problemand last year the European Space Agency estimated that there are more than 13,000 tons of material in low Earth orbit – about a third identified as space junk.
The agency estimates that with approximately 110 new launches each year, plus at least 10 existing satellites and other objects disintegrating in space annually, the amount of space debris will grow.
Last year, when a a piece of orbital junk it was discovered in rural Saskatchewan, the Canadian Space Agency told Global News takes the problem of space debris “very seriously” and is working to ensure that it does not pose “major risks” to Earth.
On February 28, 2024, Barry Sawchuk found a huge piece of suspected space debris, as shown in this image provided by Sawchuk, in his farm field near Ituna, Sask.
Barry Sawchuk / brochure / The Canadian Press
“With the increase in space traffic, space debris is a growing problem, and we are all working very closely with national and international partners to find management solutions,” Stéphanie Durand, CSA’s vice president of space program policy, told Time.
According to KSA, the debris that fell in Kenya is being investigated under international space law.
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