Yet more space debris falls from the Canadian skies

by Stevie Smith - Dec 30 2008, 13:15

Having already played host to two fiery meteors in the last month, Canadians have once again been treated to a chunk of falling space debris, although this time the junk was completely manmade.

More pointedly, officials from NORAD have confirmed that a large piece of a recently launched Russian rocket plummeted back to Earth off the coast of Labrador on the country’s east coast some 36 hours after it completed the transfer of a satellite into orbit.

Despite the splashdown of the rocket body, which measured some 20 square metres in size, a navy spokesman for NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) said the event was completely routine and posed no risk to the public.

“Officials from our command deemed it not a threat to populated land areas,” said the spokesman. “We just monitored it until it landed in the ocean.”

The returning portion came from a Proton-M rocket and was tracked by NORAD officials at Peterson Air Force Base before safely impacting in the North Atlantic.

CBC reports that the Canadian Coast Guard was unable to issue a maritime warning to inform ships of the incoming debris due to the situation unfolding so quickly.

According to Space.com, the rocket was carrying a new Glonass global navigation satellite produced by the Russian space agency. It launched from the Biakonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which is where Sputnik historically took off from in 1957.

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