{"id":334078,"date":"2026-03-17T14:40:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T14:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/334078\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T14:40:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T14:40:10","slug":"watch-fireball-that-streaked-across-hawkes-bay-sky-likely-to-be-burning-space-junk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/334078\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch: Fireball that streaked across Hawke\u2019s Bay sky likely to be burning space junk"},"content":{"rendered":"
At the same time, real estate agent Kevin Wagg was walking on Marine Parade near Bay Skate. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I first saw it I thought I could see a big hunk of something,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Thinking it was a plane, Wagg opened tracking app Flightradar, but it showed nothing flying nearby.<\/p>\n
Wagg snapped a photo before the object disappeared behind the horizon and saw the contrail left behind.<\/p>\n
He estimated the object was visible for 10 to 15 seconds.<\/p>\n
The mysterious object as seen from Marine Parade in Napier. Photo \/ Kevin Wagg<\/p>\n
\u201cIt must have been quite big,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt must have just come into the atmosphere and it just lit up so that you couldn\u2019t see what the actual item was.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was actually going slower than what I thought it should be going, so I think it might have been actually a long way away and it looked like it was heading towards the Chatham Islands.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wagg said he had seen several meteors fly over Napier before, but this didn\u2019t look like one to him.<\/p>\n
Fireballs Aotearoa citizen scientist Steve Wyn-Harris said the fact people had time to get out their cameras means it was too slow for a meteor or fireball.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe most likely explanation at this stage is that it is space junk re-entering [the atmosphere] or a satellite burning up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Bruce Ngataierua, director at Hawke\u2019s Bay Holt Planetarium, agreed it was probably space junk if it was slow enough to be filmed. <\/p>\n
Jack Riddell is a multimedia journalist with Hawke\u2019s Bay Today and has worked in radio and media in the UK, Germany, and New Zealand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the same time, real estate agent Kevin Wagg was walking on Marine Parade near Bay Skate. \u201cWhen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":334079,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2840,1561,5195,14772,51296,1976,42,87610,6804,120,39540,43,1523,8861,392,160397,179122,1361,61,40,38,41,39,16670],"class_list":["post-334078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-across","tag-bay","tag-be","tag-burning","tag-fireball","tag-hawkes","tag-headlines","tag-junk","tag-light","tag-likely","tag-mysterious","tag-news","tag-over","tag-sky","tag-space","tag-streaked","tag-streaking","tag-that","tag-to","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-watch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/334079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}