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A large metal ring is suspected debris from space Crashed in a village in southern Kenya on Monday, the country’s space agency said.
IN Kenyan Space Agency (KSA) official said the partially burnt metal object measures about 2.5 meters in diameter, weighs about 500 kilograms and is likely to be a fragment of a missile.
“Such objects are usually designed to burn up when re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans,” the space agency shared in a New Year’s Day statement to X, describing the incident as “an isolated case.”
Residents of the village of Mukuku in Makueni County, southeast of Kenya’s capital Nairobi, described their shock during the crash landing of the debris.
“I was looking for my cow and I heard a loud bang,” Joseph Mutua, a local resident, told Kenya’s NTV news channel, according to a translation from The New York Times. “I looked around; I couldn’t see any smoke in the clouds. I went to the road to check if there was a car accident, but there was no collision.”
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“If the object fell on a house, it would have been catastrophic,” Mutua continued. “We didn’t know if it was a bomb or whatever it was and it fell here.”
Julius Rotich, Mbooni Sub County police commander, told the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation the object was still warm when officers came Monday, and that residents were kept away from the area until it cooled down.
Space debris and space junk are a growing problemand last year the European Space Agency estimated that there were more than 13,000 tons of material in low earth orbit – about a third of it identified as space junk.
The agency estimates that with about 110 new launches each year, plus at least 10 existing satellites and other objects breaking into space annually, the amount of space debris will increase.
Last year, when a piece of orbital junk was discovered in rural Saskatchewan, the Canadian Space Agency told Global News it takes the issue of space debris “very seriously” and works to ensure that it does not pose “major risks” to Earth.
Barry Sawchuk found a giant piece of suspected space debris, as shown in this handout image provided by Sawchuk, in the field of his farm near Ituna, Sask., on February 28, 2024.
Barry Sawchuk / Handout / The Canadian Press
“With the increase in space traffic, space debris is a growing problem that we are all working very closely with national and international partners to find solutions to manage,” Stéphanie Durand, CSA’s vice president of space program policy, said at the time .
According to the KSA, the debris that fell in Kenya is being investigated under international space law.
& copy 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
