LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – A spectacular sight in the Wednesday night sky sparked concerns of a plane crash but turned out to be a rocket reentering the atmosphere.
Just after 9:40 p.m. firefighters were dispatched to a possible plane down in the area of Lucerne, with additional reports putting the sighting closer to Wilbur Springs.
Lake County Central Dispatch received numerous phone calls reporting either a plane down or a meteor.
One eyewitness told Lake County News that he saw what looked like an asteroid splitting in the sky in the Lower Lake area.
Additional reports came into Lake County News' Facebook page from readers around the county, the region and other parts of the country, reporting that they, too, had seen it.
A short time after those reports began flooding in, firefighters were dispatched to a possible wildland fire in the Indian Valley area.
However, it was determined not long after dispatch that there was no plane down – as firefighters were getting reports on social media of the object also having been seen outside of Lake County – and no fire.
Rather, Lake County residents were seeing what many others had seen around the Western United States.
It wasn't a downed plane, a meteorite or an asteroid, but rather the debris from a Chinese rocket.
The situation became clearer thanks to Twitter posts by Jonathan McDowell, @planet4589, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
McDowell tweeted that observation reports from Utah indicated the second stage from the first Chang Zheng 7 rocket, which was launched Jun 25, reentered the Earth's atmosphere at 0440 Universal Time, or 9:40 p.m. Wednesday, just minutes before Central Dispatch began receiving calls about the object from Lake County residents.
Space-Track, the Joint Space Operations Center, NORAD and the US Strategic Command confirmed that the object was a CZ-7 – or Long March 7 – rocket.
The Chinese Space Programme and Aerospace Power reported that the CZ-7 is a new generation of medium-lift orbital launchers. The development of the launcher began in May 2010.
It was intended to be used for the launch of the Tianzhou cargo resupply vehicle, with the new line CZ-7 of launchers to replace the country's current series of launch vehicles once its technologies are fully tested, anticipated to occur by 2020.
McDowell said that, as of Wednesday, there had been 25 reentries this year into Earth's atmosphere of objects massing one ton or more.
He said objects of five tons or more, like the CZ-7, are rare, also reporting that the only bigger reentry in 2016 occurred on New Year's Day, when a Russian Zenit rocket stage came down over Vietnam.
Trevor Kerr captured video of the rocket's descent into the atmosphere from the Las Vegas area. The video is shown above.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
Chinese rocket's reentry into Earth's atmosphere lights up Wednesday night sky
- Elizabeth Larson
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