AUSTIN (KXAN) - KXAN received several calls and emails Sunday morning about an astronomical event that lit up portions of the Central Texas sky shortly before sunrise on Sunday, a display that could be seen for at least 100 miles according to an FAA spokesperson.
Lynn Lundsford with the Federal Aviation Administration in Fort Worth , Texas told KXAN News there were reports of bright lights and contrails in the Dallas-Fort Worth area around the same time as KXAN viewers reported seeing similar occurrences.
”We have had no official confirmation that what your viewers saw was the satellite re-entering. I can tell you that people in the DFW area reported seeing bright lights and contrails to the south at the same time people there [in Austin] saw them to the north. Whatever it was, it could be seen for at least 100 miles in either direction,” Lundsford said.
Some viewers believed what they witnessed may have been debris from a defunct German satellite which was expected to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere this weekend but scientists believe the satellite fell somewhere in Asia.
“This morning on the way out to get the news paper, about 7:00 a.m., I heard a loud pop and the ground lit up like a headlight was shining upon it,” said KXAN viewer Burt Cullum who lives in Northwest Austin. “It was headed West or Northwest making little circles and trailing smoke.”
KXAN viewer Trey Carrington lives in Northwest Hills and recounts a similar sighting around 7:07 a.m., “A very bright moving light shown across my yard. I was unable to see the source when I looked up as it was gone. There was no noise associated with it. It was as bright as a spot light from a helicopter, moving quickly.”
KXAN called Austin 311, we were told they received an email from Austin Police around 7:34 a.m. saying they didn’t have any information indicating the lights were suspicious.
Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the satellite appears to have gone down over Southeast Asia. He said two Chinese cities with millions of inhabitants each, Chongqing and Chengdu, had been in the satellite’s projected path during its re-entry time.
Rand Forest who lives on Lake Travis emailed KXAN saying, “I was outside at 7:09 a.m. The ground lit up like someone turned on a super intense light and I looked up to see a very bright streaking light traveling at a very high rate of speed in a West to East direction. The main light streak also had several other less intense light streaks on either side of it. After the light disappeared, it left what looked like a smoke trail behind. I would say that the streak was maybe 1 mile long.”
Officials at Austin Bergstrom International Airport said they have not received any reports of the event.
Experts said most parts of the minivan-sized ROSAT research satellite were expected to burn up as they hit the atmosphere at speeds up to 280 mph (450 kph), but up to 30 fragments weighing a total of 1.87 tons (1.7 metric tons) could have crashed, the German Aerospace Center said.
“But if it had come down over a populated area there probably would be reports by now,” the astrophysicist, who tracks man-made space objects, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
Calculations based on U.S. military data indicate that satellite debris must have crashed somewhere east of Sri Lanka over the Indian Ocean, or over the Andaman Sea off the coast of Myanmar, or further inland in Myanmar or as far inland as China, he said.
The satellite entered the atmosphere between 0145 GMT to 0215 GMT Sunday (9:45 p.m. to 10:15 p.m. Saturday EDT) and would have taken 15 minutes or less to hit the ground, the German Aerospace Center said. Hours before the re-entry, the center said the satellite was not expected to land in Europe, Africa or Australia.
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