Sitting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the ‘space graveyard’ is also known as the “pole of inaccessibility,” with the nearest patch of land 2,700km away.
On Sunday night, the sky above Johannesburg shone bright with strange lights for a moment, leaving many residents wondering what was going on.
The space junk came from a recently launched batch of lost Starlink satellites caused by an unexpected sting in the tail from a solar storm.
Since man first penetrated Earth’s atmosphere, a slew of garbage has been piling up in Near Space. The majority of the junk up there is from space shuttles. Heiner Klinkrad, a European Space Agency (ESA) space expert estimates there to be about 27,000 objects in orbit, travelling 80 times faster than a passenger jet, and that number grows, daily.