Explained: The 'mystery debris' found in Gujarat recently
Remember that scene from 2014 Raju Hirani movie ‘PK’, where the protagonist Aamir Khan makes a sudden landing in an obscure hamlet leaving villagers shocked? Well, something similar happened last week on 12th May in three villages in Gujarat. Well, what surprised the villagers in this case and left them curious were chunks of space debris. They were found suddenly in three villages of Anand district, Gujarat: Bhalej, Khambholaj and Rampura. Here’s what we know so far about this rather unusual occurrence.
Space debris: What is it?
There are two types of space debris: Natural space debris and man-made space debris. While meteoroids are natural space debris, man-made space debris include defunct spacecraft and satellites, stages of rockets that have launched payloads, dead satellites, satellite explosions and collisions.
What all were found in Gujarat?
On Monday, May 16th, the Gujarat police lodged a complaint about one sheep getting killed and another getting injured after a metal sheet fell on a herd in Kasor hamlet near Sojitra in Anand. The sheet, it is speculated, is from a batch of space debris, perhaps from a Chinese rocket that left the earth’s orbit and re-entered the atmosphere. Metal pieces falling from the sky right into their villages left the locals in Gujarat curious and intrigued.
It has been reported that at around 4.45 PM on May 12, "the first enormous, black metal ball" weighing around five kilos dropped "from the sky" in Anand's Bhalej hamlet, followed by two similar fragments in two other villages, Khambholaj and Rampura. The three villages are within a 15-kilometer radius of each other. A couple of days later, on May 14, a similar sphere-shaped debris was observed near Chaklasi village in Anand, roughly 8 kilometres from Bhalej.
Media reports further tell us that the Forensic Sciences Laboratory team has been examining the samples, and the district collectorate is collaborating with the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad and the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) Space Application Centre (SAC) to determine whether the debris is from a satellite or a rocket.
While no official comment was issued by Indian officials, an astronomer the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Jonathan McDowell tweeted that it could be debris from the re-entry of the Chang Zheng 3B series Y86 – China's orbital launch vehicle.