Space junk rained down on Saskatchewan farmland twice in 2024, and no one seems able to explain why the debris failed to burn up in the atmosphere.
Last April, Saskatchewan farmer Barry Sawchuk found a big chunk of space debris on his land near Ituna, just west of Yorkton, that turned out to be part of a Space X rocket.
The second time was on Dan Kennedy’s farm, about 15 kilometres southeast of Hodgeville, Sask. Kennedy’s son, Travis, found the panel, which is about the size of a laptop computer, last August.
“He was combining fields of lentils on our land and just came across this object in the field, got out and stopped and realized that wasn’t normal and looked like something that fell from the sky,” Kennedy said.
He estimates the debris fell sometime between when he sprayed the field on Aug. 6 and Aug. 16 when his son ran the combine.
“The piece was about 18 inches wide and about 24 inches tall,” Kennedy said. “It sort of looked like a control board that looked to be some programming stuff that might have gone through this board.”
A friend of Kennedy’s who once worked at SED Systems — a communications company located on the University of Saskatchewan campus — tracked down a phone number for Space X in California.
Kennedy said he texted back and forth with someone at Space X who requested that he send the piece back to them, “so we just sent it back to California, to SpaceX.”
Kennedy says the company owned by U.S. billionaire Elon Musk sent him a cheque for $3,900 US for returning the debris.
The debris found on Kennedy’s farm came from a Starlink satellite, says Samantha Lawler, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Regina.
Lawler says there are more than 7,000 Starlink satellites currently in orbit, and it’s concerning that this junk isn’t burning up during re-entry to the atmosphere.
“If they are dropping pieces of junk on us that’s a really big problem, especially because here in southern Canada we are kind of under the densest band of them,” Lawler said.
With so many satellites in lower orbit new rules on how to dispose of them are needed because even burning up in the atmosphere doesn’t eliminate a problem, Lawler said: “It’s adding all of this metal to the upper atmosphere … but pieces making it to the ground is really, really quite scary,”
