A mysterious flaming object crossed the sky of the northern Lynn Canal on Saturday evening. The event was caught on camera and posted on social media. It could have been an old satellite reentering the atmosphere.
On Saturday evening, Maggie Martin was walking with her sister by the beach in Haines. Their walk ended with a surprise.
Martin: “I’d never seen anything like that.”
As they looked up, the sisters saw something in the sky.
Martin: “It looked like a cloud trail, but there were no clouds in the sky. It just looked like a little ball of fire just slowly going across Ripinski. It disappeared, the smoke lingered for a little while, and it was pretty black smoke.”
Martin posted a short video of the mysterious event to a popular community Facebook page. The video shows a burning object cutting through the sky. The caption reads “what is this?”, and indicates the time of the observation as 10.22 pm.
The Aerospace Corporation provided a likely answer on its website. The organization tracks space debris that could damage spacecrafts. It lists a satellite called Cosmos 1356 that reentered the atmosphere on the day the flaming object was caught on camera. A map on the website shows the trajectory of the satellite passing over the northern Lynn Canal. The satellite had spent more than 40 years circling the Earth.
Cosmos 1356 was launched in 1982 from the Plesetsk cosmodrome, about 500 miles north of Moscow, in what was then the Soviet Union. On NASA’s website, Cosmos 1356 is described as a 5,000 pound electronic intelligence satellite. This means it gathered electronic signals not directly related to communications.
The Aerospace Corporation’s website says satellites usually reenter the atmosphere at more than four miles per seconds. Air friction heats the devices until they burst into flames. The object then appears to be traveling parallel to the ground, and the spectacle can last from 20 to 90 seconds.
A request for comments from NASA went unanswered.
