Vladivostok Fireball Was Rocket, Not Meteor – Scientist

VLADIVOSTOK, September 1 (RIA Novosti) – A fireball that lit up the sky over Vladivostok, in Russia’s Far East, on Sunday, was actually created by a Russian rocket stage, not a meteor event, a scientist said.

Witnesses in Vladivostok said they saw a flash of light in the sky that could be a meteor, media reports said. Some of the witnesses claimed the fireball “looked like a plane.”

The timing of the fireball reports coincided with the launch of the Zenit rocket from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan on Sunday, Russian astronomer Vladimir Surdin said.

“The photos show that this was an artificial object. It was moving from the west to the east and was witnessed some 20 minutes after the launch,” scientist Surdin, from Stenberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow, said.

In February, a meteorite in Chelyabinsk, in Russia’s Urals region, caused a massive sonic boom that blew out windows and damaged thousands of buildings around the city, injuring 1,500 people in the area.