A farmer in new south wales australia discovered a large black object sticking out of the ground in a remote part of his land he thought it was a tree but this turned out to be a piece of space junk which had fallen from the sky the australian space agency later said.
It came from a SpaceX capsule, Dr Brad tucker is an astrophysicist at the australian national university and he was called to examine the object a lot of people often think they find space chunk of meteorites and it's always exciting to hear but usually easy to determine it's not in something more earthly but in this case when we got the call we also knew this that previously a couple weeks prior the trunk of the spacex crew one capsule had re-entered over the area in australia and at that time lots of people saw it breaking apart they heard sonic booms and the place the farmers were calling from was smack underneath that path.
So i was like hey this actually may be junk and then when i saw the photos you clearly saw that there was something weird about this so it was an exciting call to some degree to go and hop in in the car and drive relatively nearby a few hours uh to go investigate and confirm that this was indeed space junk from the spacex crew one uh trunk capsule usually when we have reports of space junk it's hard to figure out the source because there could be so many different things in this case because that part was, so well cataloged and it was so well observed entering the atmosphere and fragmenting and breaking apart we kind of knew that this had happened and once we were able to get the location and then obviously go there firstly it was making sure well, how exactly close is this bought to that flight path and it was within you know a few kilometers which is as good as you get you can also then see subtleties in the way.
It's made so in fact we are looking at the scorching patterns as this junk hits the earth's atmosphere it breaks apart but due to the massive friction of the atmosphere causes bits of it to burn and essentially incinerate which you can see you can then also see the materials that it was made up of uh to confirm you know this indeed is high-tech manufacturing and not farm equipment laying down so to speak and the benefit here which was the final part was there's part numbers on it very rarely do you get the part numbers labeled and this allowed us to uh confidently say it was from this and actually then reach out to spacex who then also confirmed that it was indeed theirs