Hive Planetarium principal astronomer Dr Martin George talks about the space debris that lit up the sky above Tasmania. Video by Jess Flint.
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00:00 Generally, when space debris comes back down through the atmosphere, it burns up completely
00:06 or almost completely. It's not so common for pieces to reach the ground, although it does
00:11 happen sometimes. Generally, the risk to the public of re-entering space debris is actually
00:17 very, very low indeed. And I think if there were some parts of this rocket stage that
00:23 got to the surface of the Earth, they are likely to have landed in the ocean anyway.
00:28 It's almost certain that this was a piece of space junk, although space junk of a particular
00:32 kind. It seems to have been the third stage of a rocket launched by Russia that was used
00:39 to send a navigation satellite up into orbit around the Earth. Sometimes when things come
00:45 down through the Earth's atmosphere, they can glow very, very brightly. This is obviously
00:50 what happened last night with the rocket stage burning as it came down, being visible for
00:54 quite a number of seconds in fact as it burned. And because they're so prominent in the night
00:59 sky, people are really quite fascinated with them.
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