More Weird Objects Raining from the Heavens

No surprise here! Out of the few couple of millions of objects floating around in Earth's orbit, at least some must come back from time to time. Just last week, a cattle farmer from Australia reported another incident in which a strange object suddenly appeared in a remote region of the northern outback. He believes that the giant ball of twisted metal, which appeared for no reason, might be a piece of space junk from a rocket that launched a communications satellite.

James Stirton, the farmer that discovered the strange metallic object, lives in the northern Queensland about 800 kilometers away from Brisbane and owns 40,000 hectare of land in the west region of the state. Although he found the odd-shaped ball during last year, Stirton only started investigating its whereabouts last week.

"I was riding out to check some cattle, and I came around the corner and there it was in a paddock. I know a lot about sheep and cattle but I don't know much about satellites. But I would say it is a fuel cell of some stage of a rocket," said Stirton in a interview last week. He contacted the US aerospace companies in the hope that he would find out what the object really was.

According to Stirton, the metallic object seems to be hollow inside and it is covered by a layer of carbon-fiber material. During the late 1970s, the US space station Skylab was disabled and sent towards Eath's atmosphere to be destroyed. However, the space laboratory didn't burn entirely during the re-entry and some parts reached the Earth's surface intact. To be more precisely, they fell in a western region of Australia.

The Australian authorities politely sent a ticket to NASA for littering, while the United State President Jimmy Carter in person called a motel near the crash location to apologize for the inconvenience.



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