A flash of light in the sky over Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Wednesday causing worry was assumed to be a meteorite, said Ukraine’s space agency Thursday, after officials denied it was a satellite or a Russian missile attack. Initially the head of city’s military administration said the flash to be caused by a NASA satellite returning to Earth but the same was denied by the US space organisation saying the satellite in question was “still in orbit”.
The US space agency had announced earlier this week that a retired 660-pound (300-kilogram) satellite would reenter the atmosphere some time on Wednesday.
“We cannot identify what it was exactly, but our assumption is that it was a meteorite,” Igor Korniyenko, the deputy head of a control centre at Ukraine’s national space agency said Thursday, adding there was not sufficient data to determine “the exact nature” of what might have caused the flash, reported AFP.
Something happened in Kyiv sky tonight. The whole city is at a loss, what it was. UFO? pic.twitter.com/DAic7QHae2
— olexander scherba🇺🇦 (@olex_scherba) April 19, 2023
As per the report the head of Kyiv’s military administration Sergiy Popko ruled out the possibility of the bright light to be a Russian missile saying “only experts can find out, what exactly it was.”
Used to observe solar flares, The RHESSI spacecraft, was launched into low Earth orbit in 2002 and decommissioned in 2018, NASA said, stated the report.
A “bright light” was observed in the sky over Kyiv around 10:00 pm, said the report quoting Popko as saying.
An air raid alert was activated, Popko said, but “air defence was not in operation.”
Shortly after, the Ukrainian Air Force also said the flash was “related to the fall of a satellite/meteorite,” the report added.
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After the video of the bright light was posted by several channel, showing a powerful flash lighting up the sky over Kyiv, Ukrainian social media was abounded with speculations and memes.
“While social media is amused by flying saucer memes… please do not use the official symbol of the Air Force to create memes!” the Air Force said.
NASA, in a statement on Monday, said it was expecting most of the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager spacecraft to burn up as it enters the atmosphere.
“But some components are expected to survive reentry,” NASA said, adding that the risk of harm to anyone on Earth was low — approximately one in 2,467.
