--- title: "Jettisoned From Space Station, Burning Space Junk Streaks Across California Sky" description: "Residents of Sacremento and Northern California at large were treated to fiery streaks soaring overhead. Magnificent, but with mundane origins." date: "2023-03-20" modified: "2023-03-20" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/glorious-barrage-streaks-california-sky" categories: - "Off-World" - "Space" tags: - "meteors" - "space junk" - "the digest" - "UFO" --- # Jettisoned From Space Station, Burning Space Junk Streaks Across California Sky ![Residents of Sacremento and Northern California at large were treated to fiery streaks soaring overhead. Magnificent, but with mundane origins.]() *\Image: Aaron Gleason\* ## Unidentified Fiery Object The skies above Northern California were alight with streaks of flame, burning across the blue-gray of an impending night. On Friday evening, residents of Sacramento were treated to an abrupt light show as shards of mysterious matter came careening through our atmosphere. Naturally, the striking display incited equal parts bewilderment, wonder, and conspiratorial brainstorming. Had some ET's ride tragically disintegrated, or were we simply being bombarded by a barrage of meteors? https://twitter.com/aye_ay_ron/status/1636949692549574657 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1637546602888851465 ## ISS Reject Unfortunately for those with a rampant imagination, the spectacle wasn't an episode of "The X-Files" mythology unfolding before us. In reality, it was just space junk re-entering the atmosphere, and while not necessarily quite as exciting, it does show that sometimes the mundane can produce unexpected moments of profound beauty. According to Jonathan McDowell, a renowned astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the junk originates from the International Space Station, where it was ejected as a piece of defunct communications equipment back in 2020. "What you're seeing is some actually very small objects releasing a lot of energy, very high up, traveling extremely fast," McDowell [told *The New York Times*](). Called the ICS-EF, the communications package had to be heaved off using the [Canadarm-2 robot arm]() due to its unwieldy mass of over 700 pounds, after which "it orbited Earth as space junk for three years, and reentered \[9:30 PDT\] over California," McDowell explained in a [Twitter thread](). "It probably almost completely burnt up during reentry, but any small surviving debris may have, at a guess, reached the Yosemite area," he added. https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1636954998696181760 ## Junk Rock This is actually a fairly regular occurrence, McDowell said — as in large discarded equipment eventually returning as junk for a spectacular descent through our atmosphere — but can often go unnoticed or appear novel due to the irregularity of where it occurs. "They don't happen very often over any one given place, so it's always new to the people who see it," McDowell told *NYT*. "For me, it's just another Tuesday," he said. **More on:** *[Meteor Explodes Over Texas, Causing Epic Noise and Scattering Debris]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()