A dazzling fireball illuminated the night sky over several southern states in the United States this past weekend, but it was not a meteor. It was debris from a Chinese spacecraft.
The fireball, which traversed areas of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri on Saturday night (Dec. 21), signified the demise of a nonfunctional Chinese commercial Earth observation satellite named Superview 1-02 (or GaoJing 1-02) as it disintegrated in the Earth’s atmosphere. Footage of the Chinese space debris incinerating reveals it as multiple streaks of objects glowing in the night sky.
“The commercial imaging satellite 高景一号02星 (GaoJing 1-02, Superview 1-02), operated by Beijing’s SpaceView (北京航天世景信息技术有限公司) reentered above New Orleans at 0408 UTC Dec 22 (1008 pm CST Dec 21) heading northbound towards MS, AR, MO and was broadly witnessed,” cited Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who monitors satellite launches and reentries, in a post on X. He additionally shared the apparent trajectory of the debris.
The fireball was noticeable to observers across a minimum of 12 states in the southern U.S., with the American Meteor Society receiving at least 120 accounts from Texas to Florida, reaching as far north as Indiana and Illinois.
Christopher Rainer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Jackson, Mississippi, informed Channel 3 WLBT news that his agency obtained some accounts of the fireball after 10 p.m. local time on Dec. 21. At that point, NWS officials presumed it was a meteor fragmenting in the upper atmosphere that posed no threat to individuals on the ground, WLBT reported.
The Superview 1-02 satellite was one among two Superview 1 satellites sent into orbit in December 2016 for SpaceView by a Chinese Long March 2D rocket. (The other satellite was, most likely unsurprisingly, named Superview 1-01.) The launch faced several challenges.
Rather than positioning the two satellites into a uniform orbit approximately 330 miles (530 kilometers) above Earth, the satellites were launched into elliptical (or oval-shaped) orbits ranging from 133 miles to 326 miles (214-524 km) above the Earth, as per tracking information from the U.S. Air Force Joint Space Operations Center. Over time, the duo of satellites succeeded in gradually elevating their orbits to commence their functions.
The SuperView 1 satellites were China’s inaugural commercial high-resolution Earth observation satellites. Each had a weight of approximately 1,235 pounds (560 kilograms) and was equipped with cameras offering a resolution of approximately 0.5 per pixel.
SpaceView initiated a sequence of further SuperView satellites in subsequent years to establish an Earth-imaging constellation of spacecraft.