NASA DENIES huge flash above Ukraine sky that launched air raid alert was its satellite

NASA denied that a huge flash of light over Ukraine was a satellite falling to Earth and suggested it was a meteorite.

The light was seen over the capital of Kyiv at 10 p.m. local time and immediately sounded an air raid siren, said Serhiy Popko, head of Kyiv’s military city administration. Popko added that “air defenses were not in operation.”

Popko shared preliminary findings that showed “this phenomenon was the result of a NASA space satellite falling to Earth,” said BBC.

The military official may have assumed the light was the 600-pound craft — about the size of a shipping container — that NASA warned would re-enter the atmosphere around 9:30 p.m. ET after being shut down by the space agency in 2018 due to communications failures.

But NASA told the news outlet that the satellite was still in orbit.

The NASA spacecraft that was expected to fall Wednesday night had a one in 2,500 chance of harming anyone on Earth. Astronomers anticipating the fall had drawn up a map of possible impact zones.

NASA said on Tuesday that the reentry location is not being disclosed, given ongoing uncertainty about when and where it could drop.

But Aerospace, a national space program, shows that debris that survives the hellish return could fall anywhere in South America, Africa or Asia.

There’s a 75 percent chance of debris falling into the ocean, but NASA has still admitted there’s a “low” risk of it hitting land.

The military official may have assumed the light was the 600-pound craft — about the size of a shipping container — that NASA warned would re-enter the atmosphere around 9:30 p.m. ET

Aerospace, a national space program, shows that debris that survives the hellish reentry could fall anywhere in South America, Africa or Asia. The white lines are potential impact zones

Professor Hugh Lewis, aerospace lecturer at the UK’s University of Southampton, shared on Twitter: ‘Unfortunately, many people live in latitudes, so the risk of an accident is still relatively high.’

While NASA said Monday the craft could re-enter around 9:30 p.m., some reports indicate 7 p.m. — about 4 p.m.

At around 5 p.m. ET, reports appeared online of pieces of the “satellite falling over Kyiv in Ukraine.”

Many of the claims city officials sent out the alert shortly after a fireball streaked across the night sky.

However, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told DailyMail.com that the object was “definitely not” the NASA satellite or space debris.

‘[It could be a natural meteor or Russian missile attack,’ he said. 

The dead craft is NASA’s Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI), which was tasked with observing solar flares when it launched on February 5, 2002.

It was decommissioned in 2018 after NASA failed to communicate with it.

Aerospace’s reentry project map places RHESSI over the northwestern region of India, suggesting this location is where it sits over Earth.

There is a 75 percent chance of the debris crashing into the ocean, but NASA has still admitted there is a chance it could impact land

‘Thanks to a quirk of orbits and a spherical Earth, the impact probability for any elements of the spacecraft surviving to Earth’s surface is greatest at latitudes around 38 degrees North and South,’ Lewis shared. 

‘There is no chance of impact at higher latitudes.’

While the chances of debris hitting humans do not sound that dire, the risk is higher than someone getting hit by a car. 

Data from the Centers for Disease Control shows that the odds of being struck by a car in the US is about 1 in 4,292.

RHESSI launched aboard an Orbital Sciences Corporation Pegasus XL rocket, aiming to image the high-energy electrons that carry a large part of the energy released in solar flares.

It achieved this with its sole instrument, an imaging spectrometer, which recorded X-rays and gamma rays from the Sun.

Before RHESSI, no gamma-ray or high-energy X-ray images of solar flares had been taken.

Data from RHESSI provided vital clues about solar flares and their associated coronal mass ejections.

These events release the energy equivalent of billions of megatons of TNT into the solar atmosphere within minutes and can have effects on Earth, including the disruption of electrical systems. Understanding them has proven challenging. 

RHESSI recorded more than 100,000 X-ray events during its mission tenure, allowing scientists to study the energetic particles in solar flares.

The imager helped researchers determine the particles’ frequency, location, and movement, which allowed them to understand where the particles were being accelerated.