A huge hunk of burning metal appeared in the Australian desert this past weekend, discovered by mine workers in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia. Yesterday, the Australian Space Agency confirmed that the smoking wreckage smashed into Earth from space, writing on X that, “The debris is likely a propellant tank or pressure vessel from a space launch vehicle.”
Though officials there wouldn’t conjecture as to the precise source of the junk—“The Agency is continuing the process of determining the exact nature of the debris and its origin through engagement with global counterparts”—at least one expert suspects it came from a Chinese rocket. Dutch archaeologist-turned-space scientist Marco Langbroek of Delft Technical University, wrote on his blog SatTrackCam Leiden that, “the origin of this apparent space debris is a Chinese Jielong 3 upper stage.”
This is not the first time that smoldering space junk has pummeled Earth. Not by a longshot. The first recorded incident, in fact, was in 1969, when debris from a Soviet spacecraft struck the deck of a Japanese ship. And the space age has been littered with such events. Notably, in 1978 a Soviet satellite that descended through the atmosphere above Canada sprinkled radioactive debris across the northern part of that country.
The number of satellites and assorted space jetsam in low Earth orbit has increased exponentially since those early days. Just comparing now with 2019, there are almost 10,500 more objects floating at altitudes below 1,200 miles above our heads. In total, there are now more than 24,000 objects in low Earth orbit. That 76 percent increase, according to a recent study in Acta Astronautica, is cause for alarm.
Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics at the University of Birmingham in England, recently told Space.com that there is a 10 percent chance that those orbiting objects collide within a year. That could increase as more objects join the fray—as more debris floats around our planet, the chances of more space junk raining down increases. Just last May, two pieces of the trunk section of the SpaceX Crew-7 Dragon vessel rained down from the sky in North Carolina, and several more space junk incidents have occurred this year.
Though satellites and other spacecraft can and do perform evasive maneuvers to avoid such collisions, the more crowded low Earth orbit gets, the more errors in these maneuvers are apt to happen.
And you thought traffic on your morning commute was bad. 
Lead image: NASA
