A passenger jetliner witnessed flaming debris falling from space near their aircraft earlier this week. What was it and could it have been prevented?
A flight across the South Pacific from Santiago, Chile, to New Zealand narrowly missed a collision with flaming objects entering Earth's atmosphere on Thursday. New Zealand officials originally claimed that they believed the flaming objects were pieces of a Russian cargo ship that re-entered earlier than the Russians had projected. But there is evidence that 12 hours later the cargo ship/space junk arrived on schedule. This leaves the flaming debris to have a solar system origin.
Now the most likely explanation for the flaming objects is that of a meteor breaking up as it entered our atmosphere. This meteor was reported to have been only five nautical miles from the airplane, or 20 seconds away from collision.
Space junk is a real concern, not only to space shuttles and the space station (as objects have hit the space shuttle). About 150 pieces of space junk de-orbit and fall back to Earth every year. Most of these are designed to fall into the Pacific Ocean, where there is mostly water and only the occasional island or airplane. However some of these fall where they wish. Most of them burn up significantly before ever reaching the ground.
Meteors are the more pressing threat of the two, however. They occur much more frequently (approximately 50 per day), and they cannot be predicted. While they make spectacular shows in the sky as they enter, both at night and sometimes during the day for larger pieces, most of them burn up completely before reaching the ground. Not all, however. And this also does not protect aircraft which fly in the troposphere and stratosphere, where these objects are still whole and flaming.
What can we do about this hazard from space? Not much, as it turns out. Most of these pieces are too small for us to ever detect before they reach our atmosphere. Fortunately a lot of the pieces are too small to damage an aircraft also, many of them being the size of grains of sand. But the rock-sized pieces, which could slice through airplanes at that speed, cannot be tracked and therefore cannot be avoided. We can just be thankful that there are not more space rocks bombarding our atmosphere and that the odds of hitting a tiny airplane in the sky are in our favor.
For more on dangerous space objects, read Death from Above - Meteors.
