As commercial space activity ramps up, detritus from launches poses a risk to active satellites and those of us down on Earth<\/p>\n
Last month, people in a small village in Kenya looked to the sky and saw a red glowing ring slowly descending. The half-tonne piece of metal crashed into a nearby thicket with a loud bang, leaving them shaken and perplexed. What was the mysterious object<\/a>? Was it an alien spacecraft? Sadly, the truth of the matter was much more prosaic: it was a piece of space junk.<\/p>\n The Kenya Space Agency identified the object as a separation ring from a launch rocket. Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earth\u2019s atmosphere or to fall over unpopulated areas, leading the agency to declare this as \u201can isolated case\u201d.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As commercial space activity ramps up, detritus from launches poses a risk to active satellites and those of us down on Earth Last month, people in a small village in Kenya looked to the sky and saw a red glowing ring slowly descending. The half-tonne piece of metal crashed into a nearby thicket with a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}