The tracks of the fall of a satellite and a weapon system have been excluded. The flash that lit up the skies of kyiv on Wednesday evening, triggering an anti-aircraft alert, was probably due to a meteorite, the Ukrainian space agency said on Thursday (April 20).
“We can’t exactly identify the thing. Our hypothesis is that it is a meteorite, but, to establish its exact nature, we lack data, “declared to Agence France-Presse (AFP) the deputy head of the control center of the Ukrainian space agency, Ihor Kornienko. He added: “Observational instruments recorded a loud explosion, we recorded it and determined where it happened. »
The agency could not “assess the size” of the body that entered Earth’s atmosphere, causing the flash, without a ground strike, he said, before arguing “According to our data, it did not arrive on Earth, there was no impact since there is no [recorded] seismic data. »
Error recognized by the Ukrainian military administration
Earlier on Thursday, the military administration of the Ukrainian capital had admitted having been mistaken the day before by claiming that the phenomenon had been caused by “the fall of a NASA satellite on Earth” – the American agency had mentioned earlier in the week that the Rhessi satellite, weighing some 300 kilos, would return to the atmosphere at an undetermined time on Wednesday.
“It’s up to the experts to find out what exactly it was,” Serhi Popko, head of the city’s military administration, wrote on Telegram. “The most important thing is the safety of Kyiv and its people. It was not a missile attack and our anti-aircraft defense did not use its weapons,” Popko added.
The phenomenon led to the brief triggering of an anti-aircraft alert on Wednesday evening. The inhabitants of Kiev, far from giving in to panic and accustomed to anti-aircraft alerts and Russian bombardments, then rushed to social networks to broadcast their images of the fireball which lit up the sky of the capital, around 19 hours. 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.
