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One of the pieces is said to weigh nearly 100 pounds and likely came from a SpaceX mission.
Barry Sawchuk stands next to the space junk he found on his farm. Credit: Twitter/Gillian Massie/980 CJME.
The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix and AM980 CJME report that Barry Sawchuk and his son were tending to their farmland in southeastern Saskatchewan when they discovered several pieces of space debris that may have come from a SpaceX mission. It is said that he discovered it.
“It’s not every day you go out into the field and find space junk,” Sawchuk, 66, told The Phoenix. “We were just scouting the scene,” Sawchuk told CJME’s Jillian Massey. “Before planting on April 28th, my son and I were driving around and saw something that looked like trash…We stopped the car and picked it up, but it wasn’t trash.”Farm The largest one weighs just under 100 pounds (45 kilograms), according to Lord.
The photo reached University of Regina astrophysicist Samantha Lawler, who identified the debris as space junk. Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist who specializes in space launch tracking, said the debris could have come from the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that returned from the Axiom 3 mission to the International Space Station in February. Said it was expensive. mcdowell It is predicted that the re-entry orbit has passed. Within a few miles of where Sawchuck discovered the debris.
The Dragon Trunk section of the Axiom 3 mission re-entered the skies over Saskatchewan on February 26th. It appears that pieces of it were found on the ground. https://t.co/knHXjz5VM0
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) May 9, 2024
SpaceX’s Dragon capsule is designed to eject its support module, or trunk, into Earth’s atmosphere, where it burns up. However, this is not the first case where it did not fully materialize. In 2022, space debris from another SpaceX mission was discovered in Australian farmland. This discovery was preceded by the discovery of more SpaceX space junk on a farm in Washington state in 2021.
Barry took a few hours off from sowing to show me some space junk he had found while checking on his crops. I picked him up directly from the field yesterday.
Would you like to come get this? @SpaceX @Eron Musk Please come and visit us! https://t.co/xzXU8Fgm0L
— Gillian Massie (@massie_gillian) May 15, 2024
falling from the sky
As more private space companies launch more missions and satellites into space, more space junk is likely to fall to Earth.
According to NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Office, between 200 and 400 tracked space objects fall to Earth each year. Currently, there are approximately 170 million pieces of space debris around the Earth. Of that number, only about 1,000 are actual spacecraft.
