Streaks of fire stretched across the sky of multiple Western states on Wednesday night.
The falling item was a Chinese CZ-7 rocket re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere over California.
Austin Jamison with the National Weather Service said space is full of old decommissioned satellites that have nowhere else to go, but down.
“Eventually they stop working, they become defunct. So, they’re literally hunks of machines up there that fall back to Earth,” he said.
While re-entries are not unusual, astronomer Johnathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for and Astrophysics tweeted that items as large as the CZ-7 rocket are rare.
So far in 2016 there have been 25 reentries of objects massing 1 ton or more. But objects of 5 ton+ class like this are rare.
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) July 28, 2016
