Straight out of Stargate? Mysterious half-ton ring fell from the sky in Kenya

After the door on Mars, the spiders on Mars, and the face on Mars, here is… the ring on Earth. A new mystery from space.

Monday December 30, 2024, a metal object fell in Mukuku, a village in southern Kenya. As of this Friday, January 17, 2025, an official investigation by the Kenyan Space Agency (KSA) is underway to formally identify this metal ring of approximately 2.5 m in diameter and 500 kg.

Many hypotheses

The Kenyan Space Agency initially mentioned a separation ring for a rocket designed either to burn when it returns to the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall on uninhabited areas.

Contacted by actu.frGilles Dawidowicz, vice-president of the Astronomical Society of France, thinks the same. He evokes the hypothesis of the “collar”, the piece between two stages of a rocket.

For Romain Lucken, boss of Aldoria, a French startup specializing in satellite monitoring, the hypothesis of debris “is absolutely plausible”. According to him, it would be part of the upper stage of the PSLV (Polar satellite launch vehicle) developed by the Indian Space Agency.

“There is a mission which was sent on December 30 with a re-entry date which corresponds well and above all a re-entry point which corresponds very well, within a few tens of kilometers”, he explains to theAFP.

Space debris, really?

“I’m not even totally convinced that the ring is space debris,” argues Jonathan McDowell, an American astronomy expert who helped identify a piece of the International Space Station that fell on a home in Florida in April 2024. He studied several hypotheses, including that of the atmospheric reentry of a part of the Ariane V184 rocket, in 2008, while noting that the mass did not correspond.

“This part does not belong to an element of a European launcher operated by Arianespace,” reacted the French group when questioned by AFP on this hypothesis.

John Crassidis, professor at New York University SUNY who works with NASA on space debris, judges for his part that the technical assessments of the Kenyan agency “are 100% accurate” and that they will succeed “in determine which country it comes from because each country does things a little differently.”

According to Christophe Bonnal, French specialist in space pollution, the object could come from a military launcher. “They are armored, that would corroborate the fact that it is very massive and heavy,” he said. But it could also come from an excavator or a tank, he added.

Not the first… And certainly not the last

These episodes have not yet caused any deaths, but they are becoming more and more frequent with the multiplication of launches. If uncertainties remain about the nature of the object that fell from the sky on a village in Kenya at the end of December, such episodes are likely to multiply with the proliferation of space debris.

Ten years ago, an object capable of creating impact fragments re-entered the atmosphere approximately every two weeks, now this can happen twice a week.

“This will end up falling on critical infrastructure like a nuclear power plant or an oil tanker, on homes,” warns Romain Lucken.

“It’s our sword of Damocles,” adds Christophe Bonnal. But geography helps, he adds, since the Earth is 71% covered by oceans and 10% by deserts and that there is “only 3.3% of the surface of the globe which is densely populated “.

There are some 30,000 cataloged pieces of space debris larger than 10 centimeters and more than a million larger than 1 centimeter and they are all potentially “dangerous”, according to Romain Lucken.

“The catalog does not include different military objects. If it is a piece of an American missile, we may never know,” Christophe Bonnal also notes.

Russia and China “do not follow any rules”

John Crassidis mentions Russia and China which, according to him, do not respect “any rules” in this area.

In Europe, regulations require operators to put in place measures to “either make controlled reentries into uninhabited areas in the South Pacific, or ensure that the objects will be completely destroyed,” underlines Romain Lucken.

“But that’s the theory. Once the mission is launched, anything can happen. And no one is going to condemn them to pay compensation if there is an accident,” he concludes.

With AFP.

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