Astronomers: the second step of Falcon 9 exploded over Blagoveshchensk

According to observations and information from publicly available databases, it was established that an unknown object that had recently appeared in the sky of the Far East is most likely the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, Gazeta.ru reports .

Yesterday at about 00:50 Moscow time, some residents of the Far East could observe an unusual phenomenon in the sky. A large space object of unknown origin entered the atmosphere above their heads. In Khabarovsk, the entrance was fixed at 00:45 Moscow time.

The object lit the sky and exploded. A few minutes later there was a bang from the explosion, his strength was small - the windows in the windows of the houses did not even rattle from him. The trail of the explosion remained in the sky for about two hours, witnesses to the event reported.
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The work to establish the nature of the object was carried out by a group of specialists: the scientific director of the astronomical observatory of the FPA “Ka-Dar” Stanislav Korotky, the employee of the private space company Dauria Vitaly Egorov (widely known in the Runet under the nickname Zelenyikot ) and an observer from Petrozavodsk Andrey Mezentsev.

We used data from the space-track.org database, which contains information about spacecraft orbiters , and Heavens-Above website for tracking artificial satellites. The researchers found objects that were supposed to enter the atmosphere of the Earth and fall in the next day. Best of all, the second stage of the Falcon 9 came up for the role of a restbreaker.





Then the trajectory of the flight of an unknown object over Blagoveshchensk was compared with the trajectory of the Falcon 9 stage. It turned out that they are very similar. The speed characteristics and how the object was destroyed also speak in favor of this hypothesis.

On January 10, a private company, SpaceX, successfully launched a Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station. The first stage of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle was tried to land on a barge for the first time in history, but the success of this task was only partial - the hydraulic rudder wheels had run out of liquid and the rocket fell firmly on the surface of an unmanned offshore landing platform.

SpaceX hopes to succeed in implementing the re-use program for missile units. This will reduce the cost of launching a hundred times and in a revolutionary way will change access to space, says Ilon Mask.

The second stage of the rocket is a cigar-shaped object 15 meters long and 3.66 meters in diameter. Without fuel, it weighs a little less than 5 tons. To output the payload to a given orbit, the Merlin 1D engine of the second stage worked for 6.5 minutes, then it performed braking.

In the two previous launches, de-orbit was conducted over the Indian Ocean. It seems that this time when braking the second stage there was not enough fuel to get the same characteristics. This time it was necessary to leave some fuel in the first stage for an attempt to land on a special barge, therefore there was more work for the second stage.

Because of the differences in shape and mass, the fairings entered the atmosphere after a few days, while the second stage itself had an expected life of about a week. Gradually, it was inhibited by the resistance of the upper layers of the atmosphere.

Entry characteristics of objects depend on the level of the atmosphere, it decreases and increases depending on solar activity. In this case, most of the objects (especially if it is the stage of a rocket with thin-walled load-carrying tanks) are burned at the entrance without harm to the population. Some parts of engines or pressurization systems can reach the surface of the Earth.

The approximate time with accuracy of ± 7 minutes and the place of entry was determined by the American space services, and they turned out to be right: the time of 21:46 UTC and the window over Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China, Russia and the Pacific was predicted.