posted 03-30-2009 05:29 PM               

SPACE.com: Mysterious East Coast Boom Was Falling Russian Rocket

The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.

"I'm pretty convinced that what these folks saw was the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched the crew up to the space station," said Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

Residents of the areas around Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Va., began calling 911 last night with reports of hearing a loud boom and seeing a streak of light that lit up the sky, according to news reports.

Chester heard about the incident this morning; the Naval Observatory gets plenty of reports of such fireballs and Chester investigated whether it could be a meteor or whether there were "any potential decays of space junk that were coming up," he told SPACE.com.

He checked the listing for debris that were expected to enter the lower atmosphere from their decaying orbits around this time period and found that second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched last Thursday was slated to hit during a window that started at 8 p.m. last night.

posted 03-31-2009 12:05 PM               

A brilliant fireball in the Virginia sky on Sunday was likely a natural meteor event and not the remnants of a Russian rocket, scientists now say, a reversal from yesterday's initial analysis.

On Monday, Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory told SPACE.com that the loud boom and flash of light seen in the skies over Norfolk and Virginia Beach was likely the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched Expedition 19 to the International Space Station last Thursday.

However, U.S. Strategic Command has since reported that the rocket re-entered Earth's atmosphere near Taiwan, on the other side of the world, several hours after the reports of the fireball. So both its timing and entry location rule out the rocket as the explanation for the fireball.

"Well, we're all entitled to a 'mulligan' now and then, right," Chester wrote SPACE.com in an email, adding that he deferred Strategic Command. (A mulligan is a do-over in golf.)

"However, it is still a remarkable coincidence that a random rock would fall out of the sky along a path that is very similar to the ground-track of a decaying rocket body," Chester added. "But this is what makes science fun!"