As terrible as all the pollution from reentries is, I have to say that it's REALLY FREAKING COOL that I now know all the right people to ask to find out what exactly reentered when a journalist sends me a reddit video from a random Canadian city

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

As terrible as all the pollution from reentries is, I have to say that it's REALLY FREAKING COOL that I now know all the right people to ask to find out what exactly reentered when a journalist sends me a reddit video from a random Canadian city.

I don't know the answer yet, but I know who to ask! (More details soon, hopefully)

And spoiler alert: the odds are extremely high that any reentry anywhere is a Starlink, they're burning up 1 or 2 per day on average.

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

FYI, the best place to check and see what that cool fireball you saw in the sky was, is this website: https://fireball.amsmeteors.org/members/imo_view/browse_events

You can even report your sightings! This helps scientists to find meteorites, though I think a lot of the sightings now are actually reentries.

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

Confirmed! It's a Starlink! Prof. Peter Brown found it in Global Meteor Network data (it maybe was even in my meteor camera! If it was running properly... his team is digging through data now)

Starlink 1066, burned up from Calgary through to mid-Saskatchewan. Now the real question, did it dump debris onto Saskatchewan like at least one other Starlink satellite and a Crew Dragon Trunk last year?

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

Here's the original reddit post that started my email explosion of an afternoon. Thanks, reddit...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Calgary/comments/1no9qmi/anyone_else_see_the_5_fireballs_streak_across_the/

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

And here's the ground track from @planet4589.bsky.social

Welp, time to go on the radio and ask Saskatchewan farmers out looking for pieces! (Maybe THIS time I can get some small town to issue SpaceX a fine for littering? That would be delightful.)

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

It is WILD that we now live in a time where my job as an astrophysics professor has gone from "learn cool things about space" to "try to get someone to hold billionaires accountable for dropping shit on us from orbit"

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

More info: another journalist sent me more reddit-posted videos from Saskatoon. It's quite impressive how the tight fireball observed over Calgary (see reddit video linked further up in this thread) has shredded into lots of small fireballs by the time it got to Saskatoon. https://www.reddit.com/r/saskatoon/comments/1nolj4b/falling_objectmeteor_above_saskatoon/

Also scary, because those are the bits that might have made it to the ground.

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

I don't have an official potential landfall location prediction (which I know the Global Meteor Network team is working on), but I'm guessing it's not too far east of Saskatoon.

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

The fireball (that was actually a reentry, as noted) is now on the AMS fireball website: https://fireball.amsmeteors.org/members/imo_view/event/2025/6172

Interestingly, they don't have it going all the way to Saskatoon, though I've seen a couple of videos from there. More people should report their observations! (Though I think probably that is super annoying to the people trying to study meteors... yet another part of astronomy SpaceX is destroying)

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

HAHAHA I love that they quoted me on this "It's like billionaires dropping their garbage on our heads"

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/saskatoon-space-debris-satelitte-reentry-1.7643516

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@sundogplanets Deponia, but it's real life

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

Here's the official Global Meteor Network camera video of the reentry of Starlink 1066 on Monday night/Tuesday morning from Lucky Lake, Saskatchewan! This video is courtesy University of Western Ontario and Defence R&D Canada.

I counted 13 pieces in the video, how many do we think made it to the ground and are sitting on canola stubble east of Saskatoon?

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

I finally heard back from the experts, and they are pretty convinced that any pieces that survived would have fallen a lot further east than I was originally guessing.

They think any surviving pieces would have fallen east of highway 35, in the boreal forest. The forest will swallow up yet more garbage. Nobody is going to find those pieces.

But don't worry, SpaceX is burning up 1 or 2 Starlinks a day right now, so we'll have more opportunity to test this. Sigh.

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

I've gotten 2 emails from people on the prairies who were sharing photos of what they thought was the debris fall. They were both not (one was a starlink train, one was a sunset-illuminated contrail), but that's really ok, I appreciate that they shared.

It gives me a lot of hope that I'm getting my message out, and maybe someone really WILL find a piece of this latest reentry and tell me! (And then the real work starts...)

[sundogplanets@mastodon.social]

Going to add this extremely relevant video to this thread! The author goes through and very clearly explains how to tell the difference between a reentry and a meteor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5bYAjCMcwM

(Thanks for flagging it, @EricFielding!)