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\t\t\tIllustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Getty Images<\/p>\n
On Saturday, a huge chunk of what is almost certainly space junk was found lying in the middle of a desert road in Western Australia, according to the Australian Space Agency. Its exact origins aren\u2019t clear yet, but it appears to be a jettisoned rocket part.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe debris is likely a propellant tank or pressure vessel from a space launch vehicle,\u201d the space agency said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n According to reporting from Sky News<\/a>, the charred debris was discovered by mine workers on a remote access road. Parts of it were still burning, with smoke rising into the air, photos provided by the Western Australia Police Force show.\u00a0<\/p>\n Its size and weight haven\u2019t been shared yet, but the police said that \u201cinitial assessments suggest it\u2019s made of carbon fiber and consistent with previously identified space debris, such as composite-overwrapped pressure vessels or rocket tanks.\u201d<\/p>\n Experts speculate that it may have come from the upper stage of a Chinese Jielong rocket.<\/p>\n \u201cThe last launch was late September, so this has been barreling around the Earth and quite suddenly has got pulled back to the atmosphere,\u201d Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist at Flinders University, told ABC Radio Perth<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cA month ago, similar pieces were discovered in Argentina,\u201d Gorman added. \u201cThese pieces were coming from the Jielong rocket body. The [rocket\u2019s] trajectory covers Australia and they are very, very similar pieces a month ago and now.\u201d<\/p>\n Regardless of where exactly it came from, it\u2019s evidence of a universal problem in an accelerating space industry: pollution. Rocket launches are more frequent than ever, and Elon Musk has thousands of Starlink satellites in orbit. There\u2019re so many of these expendable satellites, in fact, that there\u2019s now at least one of them falling to Earth every single day<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s rare for such large chunks of space debris to land on Earth, because they\u2019re supposed to completely burn up in the atmosphere before they can ever touch the ground. But rare doesn\u2019t mean never, and a spate of these objects crashing all around the world has some experts fearing that we\u2019re vastly underestimating the threat they may pose.<\/p>\n Last year, a piece of\u00a0 space debris from the International Space Station crashed through the roof of a family\u2019s home in Florida<\/a>. The 1.6-pound metal object came from a cargo pellet stuffed with discarded batteries that the ISS had jettisoned three years earlier.<\/p>\n Months later, a nearly one-hundred pound chunk of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule landed in a Canadian man\u2019s farm<\/a> \u2014 which wasn\u2019t the first time that a piece of the same family of spacecraft rudely interrupted an agricultural estate. Two years before that incident, a ten-foot shard that came from the trunk section of a Dragon capsule smashed into a sheep farm in Australia<\/a>.<\/p>\n We still don\u2019t have a full grasp on how these objects are surviving re-entry. Modern spacecraft are made of composites, which are much lighter than the metal materials that dominated construction in the Space Age, but their newness means how they fare during reentry to the atmosphere remains underexplored<\/a>.<\/p>\n