/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/madsack/NLPBK7KMI5FEXDYIIW373CRPCQ.jpeg "Where the debris landed and when it was over Germany – time, map, warning")
Berlin/Washington. A spacecraft the size of a small car entered Earth’s atmosphere on Friday evening. Most of it burned up, smaller pieces perhaps even fell to the ground. But it is now clear: the debris will not fall over Germany. Instead, the space debris crashed over the Atlantic on Friday evening, as announced by the spokeswoman for the Bundeswehr Space Situation Center, Simone Meyer.
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At 7:21 p.m. the package came from the west and flew over the middle of Germany at an altitude of 139 kilometers.
questions and answers
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What exactly was hurtling through space?
According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the object was a pallet containing nine disused batteries from the International Space Station (ISS). The platform with battery packs was about the size of a car and weighed around 2.6 tons. It was detached from the ISS in March 2021 – with the aim of it burning up in the atmosphere years later.
Was there a danger for Germany?
The debris from a discarded battery pack from the International Space Station (ISS) will definitely not fall over Germany, that was already clear on Friday evening. The Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) repealed a corresponding hazard information. “There is no longer any danger from falling debris. “Germany is no longer in the danger zone,” it said. Experts had previously emphasized that it was very unlikely that rubble would fall over Germany.
According to the Bundeswehr’s space situation center, the debris was expected to fall into the Atlantic at 8:17 p.m., as the Air Force announced on X (formerly Twitter) that evening.
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If there was hardly any danger to Germany, why was there an official warning?
The fact that the BBK had spread its assessment – a very low probability of debris on Germany – via several warning apps via official danger information on Thursday caused some excitement. “If the risk increases, you will receive new information,” it said. “We are concerned with transparency and sharing the information we have,” a spokeswoman for the authority explained the procedure.
What is known about entry into the atmosphere?
The space debris crashed over the Atlantic on Friday evening. The time window of the crash had already been specified by the online site “satflare.com“ was estimated to be an eight-hour corridor around Friday evening German time. “For such cases, predictions of the time and place of re-entry are naturally associated with large uncertainties, mainly due to the difficult to predict atmospheric resistance. The closer you get to the estimated re-entry time, the easier it is to geographically delimit the affected area,” said the ESA.
How does a re-entry work?
“It’s happening very quickly,” said the head of the ESA space security program, Holger Krag, to the “Tagesschau” online portal. “It only takes ten minutes from an altitude of 100 kilometers, where re-entry occurs when the object begins to disintegrate, to the ground. However, the battery pack will not fall as a compact individual part in a very narrow area, but will rather be distributed in a longer trail of debris. You would expect a smaller part every ten or 20 kilometers in the affected area.”
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Could you see and hear the re-entry?
According to DLR, a sonic boom would have been heard near the re-entry and a kind of shooting star could also have been seen – so there was no spectacle in the sky in Germany.
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How great was the risk to the affected areas?
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When was the battery pack approximately over Germany?
At 7:21 p.m., the package came from the west and flew over the middle of Germany at an altitude of 139 kilometers, according to the space situation center, which then gave the all-clear.
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At that point in the evening it was already dark and cloudless in large parts of Germany.