As terrible as all the pollution from reentries is, I have to say that it's REALLY FREAKING COOL that I now know all the right people to ask to find out what exactly reentered when a journalist sends me a reddit video from a random Canadian city.

I don't know the answer yet, but I know who to ask! (More details soon, hopefully)

And spoiler alert: the odds are extremely high that any reentry anywhere is a Starlink, they're burning up 1 or 2 per day on average.

FYI, the best place to check and see what that cool fireball you saw in the sky was, is this website: https://fireball.amsmeteors.org/members/imo_view/browse_events

You can even report your sightings! This helps scientists to find meteorites, though I think a lot of the sightings now are actually reentries.

Confirmed! It's a Starlink! Prof. Peter Brown found it in Global Meteor Network data (it maybe was even in my meteor camera! If it was running properly... his team is digging through data now)

Starlink 1066, burned up from Calgary through to mid-Saskatchewan. Now the real question, did it dump debris onto Saskatchewan like at least one other Starlink satellite and a Crew Dragon Trunk last year?

Here's the original reddit post that started my email explosion of an afternoon. Thanks, reddit...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Calgary/comments/1no9qmi/anyone_else_see_the_5_fireballs_streak_across_the/

And here's the ground track from @planet4589.bsky.social

Welp, time to go on the radio and ask Saskatchewan farmers out looking for pieces! (Maybe THIS time I can get some small town to issue SpaceX a fine for littering? That would be delightful.)

It is WILD that we now live in a time where my job as an astrophysics professor has gone from "learn cool things about space" to "try to get someone to hold billionaires accountable for dropping shit on us from orbit"

@sundogplanets One or two per day! How long do they last in orbit? Do they not have any thrusters or something?