The Australian Space Agency said today that three large chunks of space debris crash-landed into Australian sheep farms.
The space junk that was found in New South Wales' Snowy Mountains region on Saturday was from a part of the Crew Dragon spaceship that reentered the Earth's atmosphere on July 9.
Mick Miners, a sheep farmer, found the first piece of debris on his farm south of Jindabyne. Jock Wallace found a different chunk nearby. Wallace asked the Civil Aviation Safety Authority what to do with the space debris. They were told to contact the space agency.
There will be a Chinese rocket booster crash on Saturday. There is a risk.
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What am I going to say to NASA? Wallace spoke to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Four NASA astronauts will travel to the International Space Station on the Crew Dragon capsule. The Crew Dragon's unpressurized trunk is believed to be the source of the space junk, as it was designed to carry cargo into space and support the craft during its launch.
The half of the trunk that was stocked with solar panels was docked at the International Space Station. Engineers intended for the Crew Dragon's trunk to hit the ocean, not a farm.
It's a concern because it's fallen out of the sky. It would make a mess if it landed on your house.
Skylab, the United States' first space station, was the largest piece of space junk to land in Australia since 1979.
All of the major spacefaring nations are parties to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which states that any country that sends an object into space is responsible for the damage it may cause to another party when it crashes back to Earth. There are either diplomatic channels or a claims commission for such incidents. In 1978, when the malfunctioning Soviet satellite Kosmos 954 crashed into western Canada, spraying a path with debris from its broken onboard nuclear reactor, the USSR paid Canada 3 million Canadian dollars in compensation.
The core stage of one of China's Long March 5B boosters fell over Malaysia and Indonesia, scattering metallic debris over villages.
Space agencies usually plan the trajectory of rockets so that any potential debris burns up in the atmosphere or lands in the ocean, but the increasing pace of space activity has put more of Earth's population at risk. There is a 10% chance of a human death from falling rocket junk over the next decade according to a July 11 paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
It was originally published on Live Science
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