She said the light appeared to be low in the sky and said it was moving for about 90 seconds until it broke into two pieces.
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The light show recalled an incident in late December 2015, when debris from a Russian rocket that was returning into Earth’s atmosphere lit up the skies across the western U.S. A few said they were confused at first because they thought it was an airplane. “I had never seen anything like that”.
“It was a cool experience”.
The website Spaceflight Now said that the disintegration of the newest Chinese satellite launcher took almost a minute to cross the sky.
Calls of a suspected meteor initially came in from as far and wide as Dublin, Livermore, San Ramon, and many took to social media to document the light on video from San Jose and San Francisco and on the Peninsula. “It did not look like a shooting star but was much larger and then split into two”, Garcia-Broom said.
It had lasted for about a minute.
The rocket took off June 25 from China’s Wenchang Satellite Launch Center, according to the website of the Aerospace Corp., which provides research-and-development and advisory services to the U.S. Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office, among others.
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A spokeswoman at NASA said Thursday that the fiery trail of sparks in the atmosphere was the re-entry of a Chinese rocket body. Components that fall back from space at high speed heat up due to friction with the atmosphere and break up as increasing density causes a rapid slowdown.
