A huge, cylindrical metal object fell from the sky and crashed into a mining area in northern Myanmar, while another piece of debris tore into the roof of a house nearby. The object is believed to be a piece of a Chinese rocket.
The cylinder, which measures 4 feet in diameter and 15 feet in length, landed on the property of a jade mining company, before bouncing around 150 feet away. Residents in a nearby village reported hearing a loud noise shortly before people came across the object sitting in the mud. They also reported an acrid smell, like something was burning.
Around the same time, a second cylindrical item measuring an inch wide and over 4 inches in length plummeted through the roof of a house. The object had Chinese script on it. The roof was damaged, but no injuries were sustained, Gizmodo reports.
Ko Maung Myo, a villager, told the Myanmar Times,
Every local thought it was the explosion of heavy artillery. I walked over to it and saw it was part of an engine.
Myo added that he thought it was an engine of sorts, because it had “a diode and many copper wires at the tail of the body.” In addition, he says, “It also looks like a jet engine block.”
Early assumptions point to the objects being satellite debris, a part of a missile or an aircraft engine. But it’s most likely that the item is related to the recent launch of a Chinese satellite, as a Long March 11 rocket took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Wednesday. The debris in Myanmar does resemble a rocket part, which cleaves off a satellite before reaching space.
Last year, debris from a rocket engine also crashed through the roof of a residential structure in China’s Shanxi province, prompting concerns on how China’s space agency and government are handling safety in their space missions.
