The fireball was preceded by a loud boom and a feeling similar to an earthquake aftershock, with the object subsequently breaking up in the atmosphere.
Despite social media speculation of a meteor, the ASA, in a statement today, said it was likely from an earlier Roscosmos Soyuz-2 launch.
“Launch of the Soyuz-2 rocket occurred from Plesetsk Cosmodrome earlier in the evening. According to Russian authorities, the launch placed a new generation ‘GLONASS-K2’ global navigation satellite into orbit,” the agency said.
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“This launch was notified, and remnants of the rocket were planned to safely re-enter the atmosphere into the ocean off the south-east coast of Tasmania. We will continue to monitor the outcomes of this re-entry with our government partners.”
um excuse me, I just saw a meteor? I was literally just going to get a biscoff shake and saw the coolest thing I’ve ever seen ?#melbourne #melbournemeteor #meteor pic.twitter.com/8svURTU4Nk
— PeachTeaGamer (@peachteagamer) August 7, 2023
Writing in The Conversation, Swinburne University astronomer Alan Duffy said the orange colour of the fire trail indicated that the object was likely man-made, containing metals and plastics.
“Most space junk doesn’t make it to Earth. The incredible heat of 5,000 Kelvin or greater generated by the re-entry burns up almost all such pieces,” he said.
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“Some hardier engine blocks can make it to the ground, however, which is why alerts about space junk re-entering the atmosphere are sent out to aircraft in particular.
“However, space junk travels so fast, even a very small mistake in the calculation of the re-entry will have it show up hundreds of kilometres away instead. For most purposes, such warnings are not as helpful as they could be.”
The bright flash follows a separate incident in Queensland earlier this year that was later identified as the biggest meteor in Australia for at least 30 years.
Dr Ellie Sansom, who heads Curtin’s Desert Fireball project to track space rocks, made the discovery after analysing NASA data that dropped on Monday.
The meteor exploded 29 kilometres over Blackbull, a minuscule locality between the Gulf communities of Normanton and Croydon in the north-west of the state, on 20 May.
Figures later provided by NASA suggested the meteor was travelling at 28 kilometres per second, and the force of the blast was equivalent to exploding 7.2 kilotons of TNT.
Scientists used the data to deduce the meteor would have had a diameter of 3.5 metres and weighed about 80,000 kilograms.
The Desert Fireball Network (DFN) is a network of 52 autonomous stations across Australia designed to track meteorites as they fall to Earth through the atmosphere.
Dr Sansom appeared on the Space Connect Podcast last year to talk through her work, and you can listen to the recording here.
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