By Tyler Wright
Flashes of light were spotted across the Melbourne skies on Monday 7 August and turned out to be the remains of a Russian rocket re-entering the earth’s atmosphere in southeastern Victoria.
An Australian Space Agency spokesperson said the flashes of light were likely the remnants of a Soyuz-2 rocket launched from Plesetsk Cosmodrome earlier in the evening.
“According to Russian authorities the launch placed a new generation ‘GLONASS-K2’ global navigation satellite into orbit,” the spokesperson said.
“This launch was notified and remnants of the rocket were planned to safely re-enter the atmosphere into the ocean off the south-east coast of Tasmania.”
The space junk created a comet-like effect for people across Melbourne who spotted the phenomenon and later felt the earth shake after a subsequent sonic boom.
Clare Lever, who lives on the border of Monbulk and The Patch, spotted the object flying across the sky just before midnight.
“I was putting rubbish in the bin….behind [my partner] up in the sky I saw it start to come into view; and I was watching it and saying to him ‘turn around and look in the sky, honey,’” Ms Lever said.
“I thought, ‘that looks like a shooting star, but it’s going for too long.'”
Ms Lever said the comet was visible for about 40 seconds.
“I filmed from about maybe 20 seconds ahead of it, and then we were still outside talking about it because we were quite impressed,” she said.
“Five minutes later is when we heard the massive boom that shook the house…the dogs were not happy and then every dog in the valley I could hear all starting to howl and carry on.
“I’ve not seen anything that long in the sky before.”
On Ms Lever’s Facebook post sharing a video of the spectacle, people flocked to comment on their love of the footage.
“Comet? Meteor or UFO?” Rakkhi Joy wrote.
“About 12am I heard a boom/rumble and heard the house creak,” another commenter, Eadie Spinebill, penned.
“I waited for a minor tremor, but didn’t feel anything. Tried to look online to see if anyone saw/heard/felt anything, but didn’t see anything online until I woke up this morning.”
Mount Burnett Observatory’s Jacquie Milner said it is not the first time a Russian rocket launch has put space junk over Australia in recent years.
“We were lucky it was clear over southeastern Australia and so many people saw it,” Ms Milner said.
“It came across northwestern Victoria, right over Geelong, and then the peninsula and then over northeastern Tasmania and Hobart.
“The bang and the noise was the sonic boom from re-entry, and occasionally sonic booms can feel like earthquakes and be picked up as seismic activity.”
Ms Milner said the occurrence was “not a meteor shower”.
“Meteor showers are where the earth goes through a debris stream left over from a comet. It can take several days and it will appear like meteors are radiating from a common area in the sky,” she said.
“It’s only when you draw plots and track them all back or you do a composite picture that you can actually see where they’re all coming from in the sky.
“Breaking up into hundreds of bits is a typical space junk feature as well.”
The Australian Space Agency will continue to monitor the outcomes of this re-entry with government partners.
