(Kyiv) The flash that lit up the Kyiv sky on Wednesday evening, triggering an anti-aircraft warning, was probably due to a meteorite, the Ukrainian space agency said on Thursday, the tracks of the fall of a satellite and a system of armament having been excluded.
“We can’t exactly identify the thing. Our hypothesis is that it is a meteorite, but to establish its exact nature, we lack data,” the deputy head of the Ukrainian space agency’s control center told AFP. Igor Kornienko.
“The observation instruments recorded a strong explosion, we recorded it and determined where it took place” in the sky, he added.
According to him, the agency could not “evaluate the size” of the body which entered the Earth’s atmosphere, causing the flash, however it did not hit the ground.
“According to our data, it did not arrive on Earth, there was no impact since there is no seismic data” recorded, explained Mr. Kornienko.
A little earlier, the military administration of the Ukrainian capital had admitted having been mistaken the day before by asserting that the phenomenon had been caused by the fall of a NASA satellite, which the American space agency had refuted by his side.
“It’s up to the experts to find out what it was exactly,” Serguii Popko, head of the city’s military administration, said on Telegram.
“The most important thing is the safety of Kyiv and its inhabitants. It was not a missile attack and our anti-aircraft defense did not use its weapons,” he added.
Viral videos
The phenomenon nevertheless led to the brief triggering of an anti-aircraft alert.
Kyiv residents, far from giving in to panic and accustomed to anti-aircraft alerts and Russian bombardments, rushed to social networks on Wednesday evening to broadcast their images of the fireball that lit up the sky on Wednesday evening.
They have also multiplied memes and humorous videos on the themes of the arrival of extraterrestrials and the war against Russia.
On CCTV footage posted on social media, a gigantic ball of light can be seen descending and then exploding.
Shortly after the flash, the military administration of Kyiv had indicated that it was undoubtedly due to “the fall of a NASA satellite on Earth”, because the American agency had mentioned earlier in the week that the Rhessi satellite, weighing some 300 kg, would return to the atmosphere at an undetermined time on Wednesday.
But in a statement to AFP, NASA said that this device had not entered the atmosphere when the luminous phenomenon was observed above Kyiv.