A small town in northeastern Brazil, in the state of Maranhão, was greeted by a 110-pound (50-kilogram) metal sphere that came crashing down. Locals from Riacho dos Poços reported that the crash sounded like a plane had fallen or an earthquake.
It’s not yet clear what kind of debris this is, but it’s not the first and it won’t be the last to fall Earthward. Last year, a space ball touched down in Namibia. That was a hydrazine tank from an unmanned rocket.
This space ball is hollow, fairly light, and spherical in shape, indicating that it could be a similar component from a rocket. The debris left a one-meter-deep (3.3-foot-deep) hole in the yard of a local. Some townspeople thought that it was the beginning of the end of the world, but the hysteria soon died down when they established that it could be a piece of a satellite or some other piece of space junk.
Peter Costa, a meteorologist at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) thinks that it could be a part of a satellite. One thing’s for sure, it’s not of alien origin.
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1 Comment
Looks like a fuel tank fom a space shuttle