Strong close-up lights with a long trail bright crossed the skies of Northern Italy yesterday Tuesday August 27, 2024 around the 9:30 PM. The sightings, in a NW-SE direction, were concentrated above all in Trentino-Alto Adige, Veneto And Lombardywith many videos and photographs that have been making the rounds on social media in the last few hours. The video you can see above was taken in Trento by Marco Riolfatti and shows what at first glance might appear to be a bolide from a large meteor breaking up in the atmosphere, or perhaps a military exercise. In reality it was most likely the atmospheric reentry of a Starlink satellite: in simple terms, the satellite was slowly losing altitude (at the time of its passage over Italy it was just under 200 km in height) so as to to gradually fragment and eventually disintegrate due to atmospheric friction. This is a fairly common operation for Starlink, the company Elon Musk which aims to provide low latency internet through a constellation of thousands of satellites at about 500 km altitude, which decommissions damaged or no longer operational satellites via controlled returns to prevent the accumulation of space junk in low Earth orbit.
Shortly before Italy, the satellite’s re-entry was observed (with a clearly distinct colouring reddish) also between the north of the FranceThe Belgium and the Germanyexactly in the areas below the satellite’s orbit. Observing the many videos that have been shared on various social networks, it can be deduced that it was an atmospheric reentry and not a bolide from object speed and from the duration of the phenomenon: fireballs cross the sky at much higher speeds (even 100,000 km/h) and typically last no more than a few seconds with a large burst of brightness, while last night’s phenomenon lasted about 30 seconds with an almost constant brightness.
Going into detail, it was about the satellite STARLINK-2382 launched on March 11, 2021. It had a mass of 260 kg and was travelling at a speed of about 28,000 km/h as it fragmented in the atmosphere above Italy at 9.29pm (Italian time), as shown on the portal Satellite map that tracks Starlink satellites and the International Space Station.
As further confirmation, the portal satcat confirms the satellite’s expected passage over Northern Italy.
