Nanaimo Astronomy Society’s guest speaker normally studies the orbital dynamics of objects in the outer solar system's Kuiper Belt, but lately she’s been distracted by space junk landing in farm fields near her home in Saskatchewan.
Samantha Lawler, a professor of astronomy with the University of Regina, has taken up studying the proliferation of objects orbiting Earth in recent years and has advocated for regulation of satellites and their proper disposal as they have increasingly streaked and flickered through the skies and her research telescope data.
Last winter, hundreds of kilograms of debris from a SpaceX Crew Dragon’s trunk module plummeted onto a farmer’s field near Regina.
“It’s just so wild that it happened right near my home,” Lawler said. “The coincidence of that is absolutely wild because I’ve been studying all the problems with satellites for years and then a bunch of SpaceX satellite pieces all fell right near my house.”
The pieces of the spacecraft came from a component known as the 'trunk' which is positioned between the rocket booster stage and the crewed capsule. According to the SpaceX website, the trunk carries unpressurized cargo and supports the capsule with power while the vehicle is in flight and on-station, such as when it is docked with the International Space Station or performing other work in orbit, and remains attached to the capsule until it is jettisoned shortly before the capsule’s re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
The trunk, which has a volume of 37 cubic metres, is supposed to completely burn up in the atmosphere after re-entry, but several chunks weighing dozens of kilograms found their way to Saskatchewan. A couple of months later a piece of a Starlink satellite came down near Swift Current.
“Why Saskatchewan? What is going on? This is just the easiest place to find them," she said. "It’s all flat, there’s not lots of woods, it’s all cultivated, there’s giant machines that drive across it at least a couple times a year, so this is just the easiest place for it to be found … There’s probably many pieces of space debris in B.C., for example, that will never be found because they’re in the mountains and the woods.”
Lawler said because so much of the Earth is uninhabited, much of the satellite debris falling to the surface goes unnoticed.
“But there’s so much coming down now that’s not the case anymore,” she said.
In her presentation, 'Astronomy versus the Billionaire Space Race,' Lawler will appear via Zoom to give her first-hand account of how a farmer discovered the SpaceX debris, which led to her being on the scene with more than a dozen journalists when two SpaceX employees in a rented U-Haul truck arrived to collect it. She will also talk about international laws governing de-orbiting space debris, the impacts of the proliferation of commercial satellites in low Earth orbit, and the atmospheric pollution created when the devices are incinerated during reentry.
Nanaimo Astronomy Society’s next meeting will be held at the Beban Park Social Centre on Thursday, May 22, at 7 p.m. Society members can also join remotely via Zoom. For more information, visit www.nanaimoastronomy.com.
