Soon thereafter, social media was flooded with videos of the incident. Ian Norman and his friends, who captured the video above (warning: profanity) from California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range recognized it as a satellite reentry.
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U.S. Strategic Command spokeswoman Julie Ziegenhorn wouldn’t say if the Chinese CZ-7 rocket ever posed danger to people on the ground.
“It was really unusual to see something that bright”, he said. It operates on YF-100, the first stage using two engines and strap-on boosters using a single engine each, and YF-115 driven second stage using four engines.
“It was a cool experience, it was attractive to see it going across the sky”, Norman said.
Multiple witnesses on Wednesday night reported seeing an unexplained light in the skies above San Diego.
Further east in Utah, Matt Holt was outside a public library in Provo amid a large group playing Pokemon Go when he noticed the bright, colourful flash of light.
When you see a disintegrating meteor-like object like this one, how can you tell whether it’s a human-made object or a natural space rock? “It looked kind of like a meteor, but it was going much slower”.
It had lasted for about a minute.
The Chinese rocket body designated as CZ-7 (41628) successfully carried to space the Tiange and Aoxiang small satellites, as well, as other small experimental modules.
Based on a statement released by NASA, the space junk was part of Chinese rocket that launched from China’s latest Wenchang Space Launch Center on Hainan Island on June 25, 2016.
“I was excited. I was in awe at the science of space”, he said on Thursday.
A bit later, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tweeted that the fireball came from part of China’s Chang Zheng 7 rocket as it re-entered the atmosphere and broke apart.
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Of 27 previous re-entries this year, witnesses reported seeing five, according to the Aerospace Corp. website. Please see our terms of service for more information.
