Maranoa residents were among those watching in awe on Thursday evening as a piece of space junk burnt up over the skies of eastern Queensland.
According to the Satflare tracking website, what people were seeing was the upper stage from a Chinese Long March 3B navigation satellite launched in 2019, which decayed on Thursday at 10.32pm.
Several videos of the slow trajectory of the debris as it streamed silently through the atmosphere were captured and shared on social media sites soon after.
As well as speculation on what it was, people such as Lee-anne Grocke at Chinchilla commented on how near it appeared to be.
Robert Salter, south of Surat, said he'd watched for a good 50 seconds as it travelled from the west in a slightly north easterly direction, commenting that several larger bits broke off as it moved.
Other comments of wonder were made on social media sites from places along the southern Queensland coastline.
The upper part of the rocket that people were seeing would have been about 12 metres long by three metres wide as it entered Earth's orbit and began breaking up.
According to Stephen Clark, commenting in a Smithsonian Magazine article, the re-entry paths of objects falling through the atmosphere are very difficult to predict.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also commented that dense pieces like parts of the rocket engines could survive re-entry and crash to Earth.
"Once they reach the lower atmosphere they are traveling relatively slowly, so worst case is they could take out a house."
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