This may become more common as the number of rockets sent into space increases.
When Mick Miners, a farmer in New South Wales, Australia, first saw a large black object emerging from the ground in a remote part of his property, he thought it was a dead tree.
But are you looking closely? And after checking the experts? He found that it was something that fell from space.
Later, the Australian space agency ASA said, it came from a capsule belonging to SpaceX, the airline of billionaire Elon Musk.
Experts described the discovery as “rare” and “exciting”? But he mentioned that such events may become more common.
The object crashed on July 9 in a vast field area, but miners only discovered it several weeks later.
Two more pieces were later found nearby, and the ASA urged anyone who came across more debris to contact a call center set up by SpaceX.
Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at the Australian National University, was called in to examine the body.
Is it often called to review similar results? And it turns out that the vast majority are not space debris.
“It was so exciting to see everything up close, I’ve never seen a piece of space junk fall like that,” he said in a video shared online.
The chance of hurting someone is ‘almost zero’
Don Polaco, professor of astrophysics at the University of Warwick in the UK, agreed that it’s very rare for space debris to land on solid ground.
He explained that although space objects fall to Earth every day, the vast majority of them end up in the oceans that cover most of the planet.
Also, the only recorded case of anyone who was injured was that of Lottie Williams, who was unharmed when a piece of junk space fell on her shoulder in Oklahoma, USA in 1997.
Other incidents include damage to buildings in Ivory Coast in 2020 caused by a Chinese missile cut-off.
However, could discoveries on Earth become more common? Especially since the number of rockets sent into space has increased significantly in recent years.
Polaco adds that the sun is also moving into a more active cycle, which could cause more debris to fall to Earth.
Perhaps most disturbing is a study by the University of British Columbia in Canada, published in July, which revealed that there is a 10% chance that one or more people will die from space debris within the next decade.
But Polako still says the probability of an individual being infected is “almost zero”. “I don’t think people need to be afraid, the probability of being hit is very small.”
BBC sought, SpaceX has not yet responded to this issue.
– This text was published in https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/geral-62408866
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