Spirals of blue light in New Zealand night sky leave stargazers ‘kind of freaking out’
Social media abuzz with pictures and theories about formations thought to be from
Social media abuzz with pictures and theories about formations thought to be from
Tess McClure
Sun 19 Jun 2022 21.38 EDT Last
modified on Sun 19 Jun 2022 21.49 EDT"Last night around 7.25pm Alasdair Burns, a stargazing guide on Stewart Island/Rakiura, saw a huge, blue spiral of light amid the darkness. “It looked like an enormous spiral galaxy, just hanging there in the sky, and slowly just drifting across,” Burns said. “Quite an eerie feeling.”
Burns snapped a few images of the lights on long exposure, capturing the spiral from his phone. “We quickly banged on the doors of all our neighbours to get them out as well. And so there were about five of us, all out on our shared veranda looking up and just kind of, well, freaking out just a little bit.”
The country’s stargazing and amateur astronomy social media groups lit up with people posting photographs and questions about the phenomenon, which was visible from most of the South Island. Theories abounded – from UFOs to foreign rockets to commercial light displays.
“Premonition from our orbital black hole,” said one stargazer. “Aliens at it again,” commented another. . .
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The reality was likely a little more prosaic, said Prof Richard Easther, a physicist at Auckland University, who called the phenomenon “weird but easily explained”.
Clouds of that nature sometimes occurred when a rocket carried a satellite into orbit, he said.
“When the propellant is ejected out the back, you have what’s essentially water and carbon dioxide – that briefly forms a cloud in space that’s illuminated by the sun,” Easther said. “The geometry of the satellite’s orbit and also the way that we’re sitting relative to the sun – that combination of things was just right to produce these completely wacky looking clouds that were visible from the South Island.”
Easther said the rocket in question was likely the Globalstar launch from SpaceX, which the company sent into low-earth orbit off Cape Canaveral in Florida on Sunday.
Burns had guessed the spiral was likely a rocket, having read about a similar phenomenon in 2009, when a Russian missile launch caused huge blue spirals over Norway. Even knowing the likely source, he said, it was a confronting sight. “None of us had ever seen anything like that before. It was spectacular.”
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Some aspects of Sunday’s launch caused observers to raise questions about other spacecraft that may have been deployed alongside the Globalstar satellite. . .In an another unusual move, Globalstar did not acknowledge any details about the launch of its spare satellite in advance of Sunday’s mission. Globalstar released a statement in a quarterly financial report last month that said it planned to launch the backup spacecraft in the “near future.” At the time, the company did not identify the launcher for the spare satellite.
SpaceX did not mention any other payloads in its live launch webcast or on the Globalstar mission page on its website.
But the relatively light weight of the Globalstar satellite would typically leave enough propellant reserve on the Falcon 9’s booster to return to landing. Instead, Sunday’s mission featured a landing on SpaceX’s offshore recovery platform.
The live webcast of Sunday’s launch provided by SpaceX did not show any on-board camera views of the Globalstar satellite until an hour into the mission, an unusual practice for SpaceX’s commercial launches. When the live on-board camera views began airing live, the Globalstar satellite was visible mounted to a structure on the upper stage appeared to be designed to accommodate other payloads.
If there were additional satellites on Sunday’s launch, they were already deployed from the Falcon 9 rocket when the live camera views began showing on SpaceX’s webcast.
. . .The $327 million contract for the 17 new satellites is being primarily funded by an unnamed “potential customer” for Globalstar’s services.
Globalstar has not disclosed the organization funding the new satellites, but the operator said last month it has signed a term sheet with a “large, global customer” to begin deploying S-band services in the so-called “Band 53” range of frequencies in the United States and in other countries.
The unnamed customer also paid for the majority of the costs associated with launching the Globalstar FM15 satellite, Globalstar said in its financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
SpaceX launches third Falcon 9 rocket in less than two days
". . .The live webcast of Sunday’s launch provided by SpaceX did not show any on-board camera views of the Globalstar satellite until an hour into the mission, an unusual practice for SpaceX’s commercial launches. When the live on-board camera views began airing live, the Globalstar satellite was visible mounted to a structure on the upper stage appeared to be designed to accommodate other payloads.
"SpaceX hauled a Globalstar communications satellite into orbit early Sunday from Cape Canaveral, pulling off the third Falcon 9 rocket flight in 36 hours, the fastest sequence of three missions by any commercial launch company in history.
A spare spacecraft built more than a decade ago for Globalstar’s satellite phone and messaging network was tucked inside the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload shroud for liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 12:27:36 a.m. EDT (0427:36 GMT).
The Falcon 9 shot off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral with 1.7 million pounds of thrust from nine Merlin main engines. The engines vectored their nozzles to guide the 229-foot-tall (70-meter) rocket northeast from Florida’s Space Coast, lining up with an orbital plane in Globalstar’s satellite fleet.
The rocket surpassed the speed of sound in about one minute, and shut down its booster stage about two-and-a-half minutes into the flight. A few seconds later, the booster dropped away to head toward a SpaceX recovery platform, or drone ship, parked in the Atlantic Ocean east of Charleston, South Carolina.
The Falcon 9’s first stage — itself 15 stories tall — landed on the drone ship about 10 minutes after liftoff, adding a ninth trip to space to the booster’s logbook.
The upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket fired its single Merlin engine three times, stepping through different orbits before finally reaching an altitude of about 700 miles (1,126 kilometers) to deploy the Globalstar FM15 communications satellite nearly two hours into the mission.
SpaceX said the upper stage reached the mission’s target orbit, and officials celebrated the company’s third successful launch in less than two days.
The trifecta of Falcon 9 missions began at 12:09 p.m. EDT (1609 GMT) Friday with the launch of 53 Starlink internet satellites from the Kennedy Space Center. That mission set a record with the 13th flight of a reusable Falcon booster, which returned to a landing on one of SpaceX’s drone ships in the Atlantic.
SpaceX teams at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California launched another Falcon 9 rocket at 10:19 a.m. EDT (7:19 a.m. PDT; 1419 GMT) Saturday with the German military’s SARah 1 radar reconnaissance satellite. The Falcon booster used on the SARah 1 descended back Vandenberg for an onshore landing.
With Sunday’s mission for Globalstar, SpaceX notched three Falcon 9 flights in 36 hours, 18 minutes, the shortest span between three missions that any commercial rocket company has achieved.
The launches marked the 158th, 159th, and 160th flights of a Falcon 9 rocket overall, and the 24th, 25th, and 26th Falcon 9 missions this year, trying the 26-launch tally SpaceX achieved in the entire year of 2020. SpaceX is on pace to surpass the 31-launch mark — its total from last year — by the end of July.
Company officials are aiming for more than 50 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches in 2022.
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