Space Junk Re-entry over California and Nevada

The American Meteor Society (AMS) received more than 55 reports of a bright object over California, Nevada and Arizona on Tuesday, December 22th around 18:10 PST.

It wasn’t a fireball. The phenomena was Russian space debris – a SL-4 rocket body that reentered the atmosphere somewhere above Arizona.

Below is the approximate trajectory calculted from the reports received by the AMS:

Most of the witnesses speculated that it was a meteor, a fireball or even… Santa.

@ktnv @reviewjournal Shooting star across Las Vegas & Henderson. From NW to SE past our house near AG Sports Park pic.twitter.com/RfpUD1fw4H

— Christopher Boyd (@CJBear71) December 23, 2015

@NWSSacramento @RobElvington @SchwartzTV @KRCR7 @ChicoER caught over #ButteCo #OrovilleCA area tonight pic.twitter.com/jnONu1BaPo

— D. Wilson (@ButteWxSpotter) December 23, 2015

@KTLA so this just happened in Ventura…. #ufo pic.twitter.com/hLT8dUVX1G

— Kolbe Gillette (@TheRealKolbabe) December 23, 2015

Tags: rocket body space junk space junk re-entry

Vincent Perlerin

Vincent Perlerin, PhD used to be a researcher in Computational Linguistics. He is now a software developer, a web designer, a community manager, an illustrator and many other things. He is working on the American Meteor Society under the supervision of Mike Hankey. Vincent is the lead developer of all the AMS projects. He's also the lead developer of the International Meteor Organization Website and the IMO online Databases management system.