Michael West’s Blog

Remember the story of Chicken Little? Well, something like that was probably going through the mind of the pilot of a Lan Chile Airbus A340, which was travelling between Santiago, Chile, and Auckland, New Zealand the other night. He notified air traffic controllers at Auckland Oceanic Centre after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane about 10pm. It was loud enough that it could be heard over the sound of the A340’s engines so it was obviously going supersonic which is not uncommon for material re-entering the atmosphere. The inital reports from the SMH suggested that it was the remains of an unmanned Russian Progress 23P craft that had been docked at the International Space Station since October to supply fuel, oxygen and repair parts. However, AP reports that the Russian Space Agency have since confirmed that the Progress spacecraft was still docked to the ISS at the time and completed a controlled de-orbit and burn up over the region some 12 hours after the reported incident. So what it actually was remains to be determined but given several tonnes of meteoritic material hit Earth every day, mostly landing in the sea, it is likely to be a meteorite of some description.
Just for the record, Lottie Williams is on record as the first and only (as of September 2006) person ever to be hit by space debris created by humans. While walking in a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on January 22, 1997 at 3:30 am, she noticed a light in the sky that she said looked like a meteor. Minutes later, Williams was hit in the shoulder by a 6-inch blackened metal object that was later confirmed to be part of the fuel tank of a Delta II rocket which had launched a U.S. Air Force satellite in 1996. Ms. Williams was not injured. On October 10, 2006, a cottage in Germany was burned down by a fire that was believed to be started by a small explosion (no more than 10mm) from a meteorite exploding upon impact. A 77 year old man was badly injured by the fire. The only reported fatality from meteorite impacts is an Egyptian dog who was killed in 1911, although this report is disputed. The first known modern case of a human hit by a space rock occurred on November 30, 1954 in Sylacauga, Alabama. There a 4 kg stone chondrite crashed through a roof and hit Ann Hodges in her living room after it bounced off her radio. She was badly bruised. Several persons have since claimed to have been struck by ‘meteorites’ but no verifiable meteorites have resulted.