Dr Martin George on Space Debris | August 8, 2023 | The Advocate - video Dailymotion

Hive Planetarium principal astronomer Dr Martin George talks about the space debris that lit up the sky above Tasmania. Video by Jess Flint.

Transcript

00:00 Generally, when space debris comes back down through the atmosphere, it burns up completely

00:06 or almost completely. It's not so common for pieces to reach the ground, although it does

00:11 happen sometimes. Generally, the risk to the public of re-entering space debris is actually

00:17 very, very low indeed. And I think if there were some parts of this rocket stage that

00:23 got to the surface of the Earth, they are likely to have landed in the ocean anyway.

00:28 It's almost certain that this was a piece of space junk, although space junk of a particular

00:32 kind. It seems to have been the third stage of a rocket launched by Russia that was used

00:39 to send a navigation satellite up into orbit around the Earth. Sometimes when things come

00:45 down through the Earth's atmosphere, they can glow very, very brightly. This is obviously

00:50 what happened last night with the rocket stage burning as it came down, being visible for

00:54 quite a number of seconds in fact as it burned. And because they're so prominent in the night

00:59 sky, people are really quite fascinated with them.

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