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Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Crew-1 spacecraft debris found in rural Australia. SpaceX is an American aerospace company in Hawthorne, California. The company makes and launches space rockets and communications satellites. SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk. Its goal is to make going to space cheap, so humans can colonize Mars.
SpaceX debris found in Australia
Around July 8, a space debris from SpaceX fell in the middle of a sheep paddock near Dalgety in Australia. The debris was a big chunk of the SpaceX spacecraft Crew-1. It had the trajectory similar to where the debris was found. The farm where the debris crashed belonged to a resident named Mick Miners. Mick’s family heard a loud bang, after which, Mick went into the field to inspect the source of the noise. At first, it seemed like a tree from a distance. But on closer look, it appeared to be mechanical junk.
Dr Brad Tucker Commented on the object
The Australian Space Agency has confirmed the space debris found in the Snowy Mountains in southern New South Wales. It belongs to a craft built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. Dr Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at the Australian National University, was called to examine the object.
“This has been super exciting to see this all up close, I’ve never seen a piece of space junk fall like this” Tucker said in an video which he shared online.
“It is very rare to see because they do not usually land on land but in the ocean. People often think they find small pieces of space junk, but they would burn up on re-entry, so it is more likely to be large pieces like this,” Tucker said. Don Pollacco, a professor of astrophysics at the UK’s Warwick University, said that it was very rare for space debris to hit land.
The object, which was sat vertically out of the ground and was black in color, reportedly landed on the 9th July but was not discovered until weeks later by the farmer, and two other pieces were found nearby.
Tucker told The Guardian he thinks the debris originated from the unpressurised trunk of the spacecraft, and expects several more pieces scattered nearby in the surrounding area to be found “over the coming weeks to months to even years.”
Threat to the citizens
Perhaps more worrying is a University of British Columbia’s study, published in July, which found there was a 10% chance of one or more people being killed by space debris in the next decade.
But Prof Pollacco still says the chance of an individual being hurt is “almost zero”, adding: “I don’t think people need to be frightened, the likelihood of them getting hit is unbelievably small.”
SpaceX has not yet commented on this.
However with a increase in number of space missions these findings may become more frequent.
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