According to the Kenya Space Agency, the object weighed 1,100 pounds and had a diameter of more than 8 feet when measured after it landed on December 30. A couple of days later, the space agency confidently reported that the object was a piece of space debris, saying it was a ring that separated from a rocket. "Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they reenter the Earth's atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans," the space agency told The New York Times. Since those initial reports were published in Western media, a small band of dedicated space trackers have been using open source data to try to identify precisely which space object fell into Kenya. So far, they have not been able to identify the rocket launch to which the large ring can be attributed. "It was suggested that the ring is space debris, but the evidence is marginal," wrote Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell is...
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