Space junk

Slashdot is reporting that an aircraft from Lan Chile was nearly hit by flaming space junk on a trip from Chile to New Zealand recently. I can attest to how spectacular and potentially dangerous that might be, as I saw some come falling down one night myself.

We (Die Familie Wilkins) were coming into Melbourne at about 2.30am from the north. The rest of the Familie were asleep, so only I saw it happen. A very bright light, one that illuminated the landscape for kilometers around and was subjectively bright as the sun for a brief second or two, flashed directly in front of me, and as it died, molten pieces fell away, like the shuttle disaster.

I shouted "Whoa!" in my best Keanu Reeves impersonation, and woke everyone up in time for them to see absolutely nothing. It wasn't reported next day, so I suspect I was the only person to see it. But I'll bet there were some melted pieces of metal between Melbourne and Geelong on the ground afterwards.

As experiences go, it was up there with seeing ball lightning when I was a kid, or the total eclipse in Melbourne that I saw through a break in an otherwise uniform cloud cover, letting me see the umbra move over at speed, while seeing the totality directly. I've had some fun meterological experiences, in the classical sense of that term.

Late note: NASA now claims that the debris was not space junk, but a proper meteorite.