A farmer in Canada has found an enormous piece of space junk in a field that is believed to have fallen from a SpaceX mission. The piece is 2 meters (6 feet) wide and weighs 40 kilograms (90 pounds). It landed on the farm of Barry Sawchuk in Saskatchewan province, northeast of the city of Regina.
The fragment was found in late April. Sawchuck describes it as a burned-up piece of carbon fiber a honeycomb aluminum lattice in between. Attached to it there was what appears to be a hydraulic cylinder.
“Not every day you go out in your field and find space junk,” Sawchuk told Global News. “We knew it came from the sky, because it couldn’t get there by itself.”
“It’s really just luck. If that had hit in the middle of Regina or, yeah, New York City, it very easily could have killed someone,” University of Regina astronomy professor Samantha Lawler told CBC.
“Here in Ituna, Saskatchewan, we’re in the process of building a [hockey] rink. I think, if I can, I’m going to sell it. Some of the proceeds will go to the rink,” Sawchuk told CBC. “That’s where I was born and raised, so why not?”
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shared on Twitter that there was a recent mission that passed over Saskatchewan. The Dragon Trunk section of the Axiom 3 mission reentered over there on February 26. Asked if it is normal for such a big piece to survive the burn-up in the atmosphere, he had a pithy reply.
“We are discovering that the composite materials the trunk is made from survive reentry surprisingly well,” McDowell said.
This is not the first time that bits of SpaceX’s debris have fallen on Earth. Pieces from the SpaceX Crew-1 mission fell in Australia in 2022. Recently, a piece from an ISS junk drop fell onto a Florida house. The number of objects in orbit has skyrocketed recently due to megaconstellations such as SpaceX’s Starlink, so space junk is more likely to be up there. And if it doesn’t truly burn up, chances are that it lands down here.
Source Link: Large Chunk Of SpaceX Rocket Crash Lands On Canadian Farm
