The fireball reported by people throughout Michigan earlier this week was not apart of the Orionid meteor shower after all.

Earlier this week, I posted video of a fireball that fell through Michigan skies. At the time, I and many others thought it was part of the ongoing Orionid meteor showers, but we were all painfully wrong.

It turns out, the fireball was a Russian satellite that was falling out of the sky to earth.

According to the web site, Space.com, the satellite had a system failure and crashed back to the earth early Wednesday morning.

Noted satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell posted Thursday that the fireball was identified as Kosmos-2551. He tweeted:

(12:43 a.m. EDT) ...is the exact predicted time Kosmos-2551 passed over the region, and within the re-entry time uncertainty window given by Space Force. So I conclude that the ID with Kosmos-2551 is solid.

Space.com goes on to say that:

Kosmos-2551 is a Russian reconnaissance satellite that launched on Sept. 9 but apparently failed shortly thereafter. The spacecraft had not adjusted its orbit once since liftoff, McDowell tweeted on Monday (Oct. 18), noting that Kosmos-2551 was expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere the next day — a forecast that turned out to be off by less than an hour.

The falling satellite probably burned out long before any of the debris hit the earth. Space junk falling out of order is not that rare of an occurrence any more because there's so much junk up there, and most of it burns up in the atmosphere before hitting the earth.

 

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