En Objet flitt duerch den Himmel iwwer Groussbus (Freideg, 19:22). / © Marc Muller
A fragment of space junk from the ISS burned up in the skies above Luxembourg on Friday evening - and one RTL reader may even have managed to take a picture of it.
RTL received photos of an object like a shooting star trailing through the sky near Groussbus on Friday evening.
Could it have been a fragment of the International Space Station (ISS) that re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on Friday?
A battery pack about the size of a car was released from the space station in March 2021, and since then has been getting closer and closer to Earth before finally falling out of orbit.
When entering the Earth's atmosphere, such fragments usually completely melt away.
There was however a low probability that it could fall to Earth somewhere in northern Germany, leading a number of precautions to be taken across the country on Friday.
In Luxembourg too, especially in the north of the country, there was a minute probability that fragments could come down, or at least could be seen, as the science journalist Ranga Yogeshwar confirmed in an interview with RTL.
© NASA/Mike Hopkins via Twitter (now X)
Could the following photos of the sky above Groussbus, which were taken on Friday evening by an attentive reader, show how the piece flew over Luxembourg? RTL contacted the European Space Agency (ESA) for an answer.
According to Dr. Tim Flohrer, head of the Space Debris Office in Darmstadt, the fragment re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at 8.29 pm over the Atlantic east of Mexico's Yucatán peninsula.
"A sighting over Luxembourg before that is in principle possible, because the object was still in orbit and was probably still intact," says the ESA.
The Groussbus photos were taken at 7:22 p.m.
An observation for stargazers in Luxembourg around 19:20 CET would have been effectively possible under certain circumstances, continued Dr. Tim Flohrer.
A spokeswoman for the space center of the German Bundeswehr confirmed that the fragment was also visible over Germany on Friday evening. Around 7:21 p.m., the battery pack flew from the west at an altitude of 139 kilometers over the middle of Germany.
It is therefore likely that the pictures do indeed show the ISS satellite burning up in the skies above Luxembourg.
