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Source of Mystery Flash, Boom Discovered

By Andrea Thompson
,
Space.com
posted: 4 HOURS 28 MINUTES AGO
comments: 195
filed under: National News, Science News
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Space.com
(March 30) - The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.
"I'm pretty convinced that what these folks saw was the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched the crew up to the space station," said Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.
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Residents of the areas around Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Va., began calling 911 last night with reports of hearing a loud boom and seeing a streak of light that lit up the sky, according to news reports.
Chester heard about the incident this morning; the Naval Observatory gets plenty of reports of such fireballs and Chester investigated whether it could be a meteor or whether there were "any potential decays of space junk that were coming up," he told SPACE.com.
He checked the listing for debris that were expected to enter the lower atmosphere from their decaying orbits around this time period and found that second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched last Thursday was slated to hit during a window that started at 8 p.m. last night.
The Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off Thursday from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch a new crew and American billionaire Charles Simonyi - the world's first two-time space tourist - to the International Space Station. The spaceflyers arrived at the space station on Saturday.
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Chester ran a satellite tracking program that showed that the rocket debris should have come down exactly in the area where the fireball was spotted.
"This is just too much of a coincidence to be coincidence," he said.
Chester said that U.S. Space Surveillance Network had not yet confirmed that this was the case, but said that he was "99 and four one-hundredths [percent] convinced that this is what it is."
The descriptions of the boom and streak of light reported by local residents were "entirely consistent with re-entering space junk, especially something this big," Chester said.
Delta airline pilot Bryce Debban reported seeing the streak of light on a flight from Boston to Raleigh-Durham when his plane was about 31,000 feet in the air.
"We saw it streak across the sky and then blow up," Debban told SPACE.com. "It was brighter than the full moon. It lit up the cockpit as if it were daylight."
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James Zimbelman of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's Center for Earth and Planetary Sciences said that the explosion being caused by a re-entering rocket was very plausible. It "sounds all too reasonable," he said.
A rocket stage would fragment and explode "just as if it were a meteorite," he said. And the size of the rocket would explain why the explosion was seen over so wide an area.
The Soyuz rockets jettison their second stage after entering orbit in such a way that the second stage will slowly fall back to earth in a few days. But "you can control precisely where these things are going to come down," Chester said.
It's possible that some fragments of the rocket made it to the Earth's surface, but they would likely have a couple of hundreds of miles east of Cape Hatteras, Chester said.
"I don't think anybody will find anything on land," he said.
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© Imaginova Corp. All rights reserved.
2009-03-30 16:28:52
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MisnU319

10:41 PMMar 31 2009

Uh, space junk burns up in the atmosphere and doesn't make a >BOOM. smh. I agree they knew where it was coming down lol, uh so you wouldn't warn the people living there???? I go with >WHAT THE F WAS IT???? LOL

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Wizard0104

10:41 PMMar 31 2009

lol we just have too make up more excuses to feel happy and confident whats wrong with denial plenty of people are doing it nowa days.

AVG RATING:
(1)

RThomas477

10:40 PMMar 31 2009

Silly explanation. Space debris will rarely if ever cause a sonic boom. The debris would have to have exceeded the speed of sound and debris falling to the earth would burn up in the atmoshere. The drag of this would negate a boom. When the space shuttle burned up there was no boom.

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(1)

Hcdinc

10:39 PMMar 31 2009

The thing that bothers me is that when something is expected to fall from the sky {space Junk} a warning of some type is usually in the news. Some arm of NASA has the responsibility to track every piece of junk that has been put ingto space by any party. This group has been in reports here on AOL as well as with TV, radio, printed news agencies, and educational media. They boast of tracking very small items with the potential to damage spacecraft as well as large items which could threaten to impact the earth. With something of this magnatude I expect that they would have posted a warning. Eather they can't do what they say or this was something that they can't explain or don't want to admit they can't explain.

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FullCircleTM

10:37 PMMar 31 2009

(They) always have excuses for (everything) but never tell us the truth.

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(1)

Wizard0104

10:35 PMMar 31 2009

o_O

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Dshutt86

10:34 PMMar 31 2009

That was just me in my back yard shooting my AK-74U at poster size photos of George Bush and Dick Cheney, the muzzle flash is pretty bright at night. Not all liberals are against guns, we might have to piss on the south again. You right wing extremists are getting out of control with your ignorance and paranoia again.

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(4)

Dshutt86

10:34 PMMar 31 2009

That was just me in my back yard shooting my AK-74U at poster size photos of George Bush and Dick Cheney, the muzzle flash is pretty bright at night. Not all liberals are against guns, we might have to piss on the south again. You right wing extremists are getting out of control with your ignorance and paranoia again.

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(2)

Wizard0104

10:34 PMMar 31 2009

It was a anti gravity vehicle that was being persude by the US air force from area 51 and the boom was the craft going into hyperspace above rural virginia.

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(1)

MasHappy Heart

10:31 PMMar 31 2009

SJDISME : Can Christians practice FREE SPEECH?Or is that just for you?

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(4)

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