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Experts speculated that they could be either meteorites entering the Earth’s atmosphere or the pieces of rocket boosters which fall off after a satellite launch.
A local government official in eastern Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district said an ”aluminum and steel object” reportedly fell at Ladbori village in Sindewahi tehsil around 7.45 pm.
Many social media users posted pictures and videos of unidentifiable objects, seemingly burning, falling from the evening skies.
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Such sightings were reported in Buldhana, Akola and Jalgaon districts of Maharashtra around 7.30 pm, and also from Barwani, Bhopal, Indore, Betul and Dhar districts of neighbouring Madhya Pradesh.
Jalgaon collector Abhijit Raut told PTI that as per the experts at the APJ Abdul Kalam Astrospace and Science Centre in Aurangabad, the falling objects could be booster pieces of the Electron rocket which put a BlackSky earth observation satellite in orbit.
”This was a regular event,” Raut quoted the Centre as saying. Shriniwas Aundhkar, director of the Kalam Astrospace and Science Centre, said in a statement that at 6.11 pm (IST) a Rocket Lab Electron launcher sent a satellite of the US-based firm BlackSky into orbit.
This was the only satellite launch scheduled globally on Saturday, and hence the incident seen the skies in north-east Maharashtra could be the falling of its rocket boosters, he said.
”This could have happened because of atmospheric friction 30 to 35 km above the earth’s surface,” he said. The Director of the Geological Survey of India’s (GSI) central region office at Nagpur, Rashtrapal Chavan, said the GSI can not say anything about these objects without a chemical analysis of samples.
Mahendra Wagh, Scientist and Technical Officer at the Raman Science Centre and Planetarium, told PTI that this could be a meteorite which got burnt while entering the atmosphere. Rajendra Gupta, superintendent of the Ujjain-based Jiwaji Observatory, said, ”This appears to be meteorites. Their fall is common.”