Very bright fireball explodes over Kyiv, Ukraine

A very bright fireball exploded over Kyiv, Ukraine at about 19:00 UTC (22:00 LT) on April 19, 2023, sparking confusion among residents and prompting authorities to declare an air raid alert.

While local authorities said the phenomenon was probably caused by NASA’s RHESSI satellite re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, videos of the event reveal it was a very bright meteor — a bolide or fireball — exploding over Kyiv.

Ukraine’s national space agency reported a ‘high-energy acoustic event’ was registered on the territory of Ukraine at 18:57 UTC.

“The estimated place of the epicenter of the explosion is in the Kyiv region,” the agency said in a statement. “The event is probably related to the entry of a cosmic body into the dense layers of the atmosphere… the information is being clarified.”

Ukraine’s Air Force Command said that preliminary information shows the flashes over Kyiv are related to the falling of a satellite or meteorite, urging residents not to use the official symbol of the Air Force to create memes for the joy of the enemy.

Officials at NASA said the event over Kyiv was not caused by their decommissioned Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) spacecraft (NORAD ID 27370).

On April 19, the agency said RHESSI is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere around 00:50 UTC on April 20 (+/- 1 hour).

Some components of this 300 kg (660 pounds) spacecraft were expected to survive reentry, making the risk of harm coming to anyone on Earth approximately 1 in 2 467.

The spacecraft observed solar flares and coronal mass ejections from low-Earth orbit from 2002 to its decommissioning in 2018.

Featured image: Very bright fireball explodes over Kyiv on April 19, 2023. Credit: Centinela35