A Chinese spacecraft burned up over Los Angeles. Earthquake sensors mapped its path through the atmosphere.

On April 2, a shower of fireballs lit up the night sky over Los Angeles and much of central and southern California. Onlookers wondered whether they were seeing a meteor, a failed missile launch, or even a UFO.

Astronomers later confirmed that the fireballs were space debris from the orbital module of a Chinese spacecraft called Shenzhou-15, which was first launched in November 2022. The spacecraft's uncontrolled return to Earth sparked international complaints about the dangers of space junk falling to Earth, but The event also inspired a new way for seismologists to use ground signals to track the fate of such debris.

The sound spikes were picked up by seismometers stationed throughout the Los Angeles Basin. Now, the team has reconstructed the spacecraft's path through the atmosphere from those seismic records. This new technology could help researchers detect incoming space debris around the world, even without visual observations.

“I am not aware of the work that has been done to try to track and characterize space debris using seismic measurements,” said planetary scientist Benjamin Fernando of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead author of the study. Fernando and colleagues described their work on December 9 at the 2024 AGU Annual Meeting in Washington, DC

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The increasing risks of space debris

Until recently, out-of-control space debris was a rare phenomenon. “Increasing space missions led to the launch of more spacecraft that subsequently de-orbited,” Fernando said. “Pieces of this debris fall back to the ground, posing a threat to people’s lives and property.”

Fernando became interested in the April 2 event after discovering that people in Los Angeles heard the sound of debris as fires burned overhead. He speculated that if humans could hear it, ultra-sensitive seismometers must have picked up signals as well.

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“Although cameras and radars are good tools for tracking space debris, they are rare in unpopulated areas,” he said. “Seismographs are better at picking up subtle signals from vibrations, especially for such a promising event that produced sonic booms.”

Fernando and his colleagues downloaded seismic data recorded that night from stations across the Los Angeles Basin, and found similar clusters of seismic signals moving inland from the Pacific Coast. They then spent months analyzing data to track the debris's path, speed, size, and the populations it crossed before it disintegrated.

Last year Fernando participated in a planned effort to track an incoming man-made object through Earth's atmosphere: a capsule carrying samples from the asteroid Bennu, part of NASA's Assets, Spectroscopic Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission. Seismometers and other equipment tracked the capsule's blazing path and hypersonic explosions over the Utah desert in September 2023. Fernando noted that the return of Shenzhou-15 represented one of the first times seismologists used ground stations to track space debris without warning.

He said this method could detect other objects coming from less populated areas, as long as enough seismic stations pick up the atmospheric signals. Fernando noted that researchers could similarly track the object's speed and path and perhaps determine its size and how it disintegrated.

If quickly applied to fireball events, the technique could help scientists predict whether debris might hit a populated area once it enters the Earth's atmosphere, Fernando added: “It's not outside the realm of possibility, but it represents a huge challenge – no “Especially with this event, because of the complex terrain in Los Angeles.”

Moving target challenges

The new approach is a new use of seismic data, says Kathleen Mackey, a volcano geophysicist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in which Mackey uses seismic waves to track the movements of magma and gas beneath the Earth's surface.

Mitigating public safety risks from objects re-entering the Earth's atmosphere is an important goal, but it is not without drawbacks, McKee noted. “The challenge is that the object is moving in three dimensions, through an atmosphere that is constantly changing, which affects how sound propagates through it,” she said, adding that changing winds and weather conditions may affect how accurately scientists can determine the location of a potential crash. From space debris.

However, it represents a valuable challenge in applied research, she says. “It's a difficult problem to solve, but definitely worth pursuing.”

This article was originally published on Eos.org. Read the original article.

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