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Date Published: 25/01/2022

ARCHIVED - Great ball of fire: Elon Musk satellite burns up over Spanish airspace

ARCHIVED ARTICLE

The SpaceX satellite generated an enormous fireball visible across Spain

<span style='color:#780948'>ARCHIVED</span> - Great ball of fire: Elon Musk satellite burns up over Spanish airspace

Stargazers in Spain were treated to an extraordinary display on Monday night, January 24 when a Starlink satellite re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere produced a spectacular fireball that zoomed past the planet at 27,000 kilometres per hour.

The phenomenon is understood to have been caused by a satellite launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company back in January 2021 in order to provide internet communications. The object had a total mass of around 260 kilos.

The sudden friction with the atmosphere of a satellite of this size, at such a staggering speed, caused it to become incandescent, thus generating a fireball that began at an altitude of about 100 kilometres over the north of Morocco, close to the border with Algeria.

From here it advanced in a north-westerly direction and fragmented as it went, so that onlookers would have noticed several fireballs flying in parallel in the sky.

According to the SMART project of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC), the spectacle would have been clearly visible from around 10pm from observatories in La Hita (Toledo), Calar Alto (Almería), La Sagra (Granada), Seville and Sierra Nevada (Granada).

The fireball actually passed over the entire country before crossing Asturias and landing in the Cantabrian Sea, thus depositing any fragments into the ocean.

Image: METOROIDES.NET

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