The spectacular orange-green light that streaked across the Outback sky above Central Australia on Saturday night left many grey nomads – and others lucky enough to witness the event – both startled and excited.
While there is still plenty of speculation about what it actually was, there is no doubt that something pretty amazing took place and was seen from and far afield as Yulara in the Northern Territory to Marla in South Australia.
Kate McMaster, the owner of Gemtree Caravan Park about 140 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs, was making a night-time presentation to guests when she was seriously upstaged as the object above ‘lit up the night sky and split into many pieces’ as it zoomed right across the sky, south to north.
“The trail it left was quite wide and bright orange … it burned up before impact, but we watched it for more than 10 seconds,” she wrote on the Gemtree Facebook page. “It was such a spectacular sight and left us all buzzing, certainly out of our seats and running across the lawn to get a better view.”
While many people immediately suspected it was a meteor, David Finlay who runs the Australian Meteor Reports Facebook page, said it was more likely the third stage of a Soyuz rocket re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
He told the ABC that he believed it was a rocket launched a few days ago to resupply the International Space Station.
“This would have been an incredibly spectacular sight as the rocket stage started to vaporise and break apart, and it is highly likely some of this rocket survived and landed in the NT,” he said. “Those people that saw Soyuz rocket should consider themselves extremely fortunate that they saw such a fantastic event.”
Interestingly for grey nomad ‘treasure hunters’, Mr Finlay told the ABC it would not be hard to find the remnants, given the rocket was about the size of a bus.
Amateur astronomer Geoff Carr, who runs Star Safaris in Darwin, agreed the object was more likely to be a returning rocket or piece of space junk than a meteor.
“If there were colours coming off it then that is almost certainly a satellite or a piece of space junk, because of all the components and the different pieces of metal they tend to burn up at very, very high temperatures and therefore they exhibit different colours,” Mr Carr told the ABC.
