Fireball was Chinese rocket
Mysterious light was seen dashing across the western sky
The scientific community has confirmed that a mysterious light that dashed across the western sky Wednesday night was a Chinese rocket re-entering Earth’s atmosphere.
The incident caused a buzz on social media as Twitter users reported seeing the fireball over California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Colorado. Residents, including from Oakland and Walnut Creek, tweeted blurry photos of the space debris.
A Utah man tweeted a 44-second video of the event, showing the object breaking into smaller pieces.
The object was a Chinese CZ-7 rocket, which was sent into space from China’s Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on July 25. It was the first test-launch of a new type of Chinese rocket and was highly publicized by the Chinese media, said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
It re-entered the atmosphere at 9:36 p.m. Wednesday near California, according to U.S. Strategic Command spokeswoman Julie Ziegenhorn.
The California Highway Patrol received multiple reports about the object around 9:45 p.m.
Candice Nguyen, 35, of San Jose, said her husband, Miguel Lozano, 34, saw the fireball. It took about two minutes for the object to cross the sky, headed in the direction of Los Banos.
“He was in a panic,” Nguyen said. “He thought it was a commercial airliner.”
The fireball was reportedly spotted up and down California and from as far away as Utah.
“OK, so I’m not crazy or seeing things,” Gabe Aponte tweeted, adding that he saw the object from Newark.
Dylan Kuhlmann was with his girlfriend and her brother when they saw the object from Willow Glen in San Jose. He said the group was spooked because they thought it was a “crashing plane or helicopter at first.”
“It was unnerving,” Kuhlmann said. “We all agreed that if the world wasn’t ending, it was an awesome experience just watching it fly.”
To demonstrate the rocket’s visibility, McDowell said that a normal shooting star is only about “the size of a grain of sand” melting and burning up when it enters the atmosphere.
“A 30-foot-long, 6-ton chunk of metal doing the same thing, that’s going to be pretty bright,” McDowell said, chuckling.
McDowell said that the rocket was launched to about 206 miles above the surface of the Earth and orbited the planet. When the rocket dropped to about 50 miles above the planet, it started breaking up.
The rocket carried a scale model of a spaceship that the Chinese are currently developing in order to test its re-entry capabilities, McDowell said. Several days after the launch, the scale model was recovered after landing in the Gobi Desert.
It was also carrying several small experimental satellites.
Smaller objects orbiting the planet are seen re-entering Earth’s atmosphere about once a month. However, the last time people saw something as big as the Chinese rocket re-enter the atmosphere was a Russian rocket that burned up over Vietnam on New Year’s Day, McDowell said.