The mysterious flash that lit up the sky over Kiev on Wednesday night, where it triggered a brief anti-aircraft alert, may have been a meteorite, the Ukrainian space agency said on Thursday.
“We cannot identify the object exactly. Our hypothesis is that it is a meteorite, but to determine its exact nature we lack data,” said Igor Korniyenko, deputy head of the control center of the Ukrainian space agency.
The most important thing is the safety of kyiv and its inhabitants. It was not a missile attack and our air defense did not resort to their weapons,” said Serguii Popko, head of the city’s military administration.
On Wednesday the ‘flash’ was initially attributed to the fall of a NASA satellite, although the space agency denied it.
The US space agency expected an old 700-pound satellite to re-cross the atmosphere sometime on Wednesday, it said two days ago.
However, in a statement, NASA claimed that its RHESSI satellite had not yet entered Earth’s atmosphere at the time the powerful flash occurred in the sky over kyiv.
Popko specified that after the flash the anti-aircraft alarm was activated, although “the air defense was not working.”
Social media was abuzz with speculation and memes after the afterglow, and the Air Force asked not to use its official emblem for humorous purposes.
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