A smoldering carbon-composite object discovered near Newman, Western Australia, on October 18, 2025, is believed to be part of a Chinese Jielong 3 rocket that re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.
ESA is preparing the second targeted atmospheric reentry of its long-running Cluster mission, with the spacecraft Rumba expected to descend into Earth’s atmosphere over a remote region of the South Pacific Ocean on October 22, 2025. The maneuver will follow the first controlled reentry of Salsa in September 2024 and continues ESA’s program to end the 24-year mission through precise, safe disposal of each satellite.
A bright fireball crossed the skies of northern India at around 01:20–01:30 IST on September 20 (19:50–20:00 UTC on September 19). The object was widely observed across Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Dwarka, and Aligarh, where it fragmented into multiple pieces before fully disintegrating in the atmosphere. Although several initial reports described the object as…
Kosmos 482, a Soviet descent module built to survive Venus’s atmosphere, is expected to reenter Earth’s atmosphere between May 8 and 11, 2025, with a high probability of debris survival due to its robust design.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage made an uncontrolled re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere over Europe on February 19, 2025, creating a bright display across the night sky before debris impacted multiple locations in Poland.
A Starlink satellite reentry created a bright fireball-like spectacle across the Midwest skies at 03:00 UTC on January 29, 2025 (21:00 local time on January 28), with debris visible across multiple states and many observers initially mistaking it for a meteor.
A large piece of space debris measuring 2.5 m (8.2 feet) and weighing 500 kg (1 102 pounds) fell in Mukuku Village, Makueni County, Kenya, on December 30, 2024. Such incidents are rare, with only a few large debris objects surviving reentry each year and an even smaller number impacting populated areas.
The body of the Atlas 5 Centaur rocket that delivered the GOES 17 satellite in 2018 broke up in a highly elliptical orbit on September 6, 2024, at around 05:21 UTC. The breakup was observed by Slingshot Aerospace at around 05:32 UTC from an observation site in Chile. They detected a debris cloud of more than 40 objects related to the fragmentation of the rocket, which currently doesn’t appear to pose threat to any active spacecraft.
An unexpected atmospheric re-entry of the Starlink 2382 satellite at 19:29 UTC on August 27, 2024, created a stunning fireball over France, Switzerland, and northern Italy.
Russian decommissioned satellite Resurs-P1 broke up in orbit on June 26, 2024, releasing roughly 100 pieces of trackable debris. The number rose to 180 by the end of June 27 and is expected to keep rising, according to Leo Labs. Following the breakup, NASA instructed the 9 astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to take shelter in their respective spacecraft as a standard precautionary measure.
