An enormous chunk of space junk may have washed up on an Australian beach.
The Australian Space Agency tweeted an image Monday (July 17) of a possible piece of a “foreign space launch vehicle” near Jurien Bay in the massive state of Western Australia. The agency is “liaising with global counterparts who may find a way to offer more information,” the tweet noted.
Speculation is swirling on Twitter that the thing stands out as the third stage of the LVM3 rocket that launched India’s Chandrayaan-3 moon rover mission, on condition that Friday’s (July 14) liftoff was visible from Australia. However the washed-up object seems to sport a heavy load of algae, goose barnacles and other hitchhiking sea life, greater than seems likely for a mere three-day sea stay. For instance, the magazine Boater’s World says it typically takes weeks for barnacles to connect to a hull.
Other rumors hold that the hunk of debris stands out as the third stage of one other Indian rocket, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). But an experienced space tracker was skeptical of that concept.
“It doesn’t look anything like that stage to me,” Harvard-Smithsonian space debris expert Jonathan McDowell wrote on Twitter.
The world’s oceans receive a good variety of falling rocket bodies, as launch operators attempt to bring their vehicles down in unpopulated areas after liftoff. And nowhere on Earth is less populated (by humans, anyway) than the open ocean.
And the Indian Ocean is usually under the flight path of missions launching from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre, so it isn’t particularly odd that an Indian rocket stage — if that is what the mystery object is — would wash up on a Western Australian beach.
Some space-junk falls are more dramatic and controversial, nonetheless.
Pieces of NASA’s Skylab space station by chance crashed into rural Australia in 1979, for instance. More recently, China has been condemned by the U.S. and other nations for allowing the core stage of its Long March 5B rocket to return back to Earth uncontrolled while constructing out its Tiangong space station.
The “Liability Convention” (1972) from the United Nations establishes responsibility if space debris causes harm when coming back to Earth. It has only been used once in space history, when a Soviet Union nuclear satellite referred to as Kosmos 954 crashed into Canada’s Arctic in 1978.
Canada and the Soviet Union eventually settled on cleanup costs (independently of the convention) for $3 million CDN, which is roughly the equivalent of $13 million CDN or $10 million USD in 2023 dollars.