A burning piece of space debris which crashed to Earth in Australia is likely to have come from the launch of a Chinese rocket, an expert has said.
The chunk of smoking metal was found by mine workers nearly 19 miles east of Newman, Western Australia, on Saturday.
Police said an investigation had been launched – while the Australian Space Agency will be conducting “further technical analysis to identify its origin”.
Any connection to commercial aircraft has been “ruled out” and the object has been “secured and poses no threat to public safety”.
Western Australia Police Force added: “Mine workers reported the object near a remote access road.
“Initial assessments suggest it’s made of carbon fibre and consistent with previously identified space debris, such as composite-overwrapped pressure vessels or rocket tanks.”
Flinders University space archaeologist Alice Gorman said the debris may have come from the fourth stage of a Chinese rocket called Jielong.
“The last launch was late September, so this has been barrelling around the Earth and quite suddenly has got pulled back to the atmosphere,” she told ABC Radio Perth.
Dr Gorman said there are many examples of empty rocket fuel tanks which have returned to the Earth’s surface without burning up.
“People often find them years later,” she added. “So this one’s a bit unusual because it was found pretty quickly.”
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In May, a car-sized piece of Soviet rocket crashed back to Earth after 53 years in orbit.
Cosmos 482 was destined to land on Venus after being launched from the USSR’s spaceport in what is now Kazakhstan in 1972.
Instead, the upper stage of the rocket failed before parts of the rocket re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in the 1980s, leaving one chunk drifting in orbit.
