Expert Not Convinced Mysterious, 8-Foot Ring of “Space Junk” in Kenya Actually Came from Space
On December 30, a mysterious 1,100-pound object in the shape of a massive, 8-f00t metal ring was discovered in a remote Kenyan village, prompting widespread speculation it had fallen from space. As the New York Times reported at the time, the Kenya Space Agency identified the “red-hot” object as a piece of space junk that survived reentry, indicating that it was still trying to identify the originator of the mysterious ring. “Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans,” the agency said in a statement. But now, space tracker extraordinaire and Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell is casting doubt on the theory. “It was suggested that the ring is space debris, but the evidence is marginal,” he wrote in a blog on his personal website, first spotted by Ars Technica. The uncertainty highlights how difficult it can be to trace back space debris that survives its fiery descent through the Earth’s atmosphere — a pertinent topic given our planet’s increasingly cluttered …
