A malfunctioning NASA satellite fell to Earth over the Sahara desert in Africa
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The RHESSI spacecraft weighing 270 kilograms fell to Earth on the night of April 19, 2023 over northern Africa. After a bright flash was seen in the sky in Kyiv on the night of April 20, the city authorities assumed that it could be a NASA satellite, the fall of which was reported earlier. This is reported by Space with reference to NASA. “The US Department of Defense has confirmed that the 660-pound spacecraft has re-entered the atmosphere over the Sahara desert region at approximately 26 degrees longitude and 21.3 degrees latitude,” NASA officials said. These coordinates indicate a fall near the Sudan-Egypt border, noted astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell on Twitter. RHESSI was moving northeast when it touched down, he said. Satellite RHESSI. Photo: NASA Most of the spacecraft likely burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, although some debris is expected to land. RHESSI was launched into low Earth orbit aboard the Pegasus XL rocket in 2002 for a unique study of the Sun. “Before RHESSI, neither gamma nor high-energy X-ray images of solar flares had been taken,” says NASA. The satellite worked until 2018. During this period, RHESSI documented a huge range of solar flare sizes. So far, RHESSI has been just a fraction of the space debris orbiting our planet: space surveillance networks currently track more than 30,000 pieces of orbital debris. We will remind, on the night of April 20, a bright flash was recorded in the sky over Kyiv. An air alert was announced in the capital. The KMDA reported that according to preliminary data, residents of the capital saw the fall of a NASA space satellite. Subsequently, NASA denied this information and stated that the flares over Kyiv could not have been caused by the fall from orbit of the RHESSI satellite. Read also: A similar meteorite could have destroyed the dinosaurs: how scientists explain the outbreak in the Kyiv region
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