AM - Saturday, 2 April , 2005 08:30:00
Reporter: Anne Barker
EDMOND ROY: Was it a bird, was it a plane? Australians across a vast swathe of the country last night were baffled by a huge glowing object cutting across the sky.
Police switchboards in the Northern Territory were jammed with callers reporting the spectacular phenomenon, with some suggesting a rare meteor shower, and others fearing a plane had come down.
And as Anne Barker reports, even the astronomers have been left wondering.
ANNE BARKER: Police and the weather bureau were inundated with calls last night reporting a massive, burning object tracking across the night sky. From Esperance in Western Australia's south to the edge of the Northern Territory tropics, the mysterious object captivated all who saw it.
Peter Byrne in Alice Springs says it took a full minute to disappear over the horizon.
PETER BYRNE: In the sky was this huge not like a meteorite shower like a huge amount of debris, tracking through the sky, with one main kind of ball of
like a glowing kind of fire stuff out the front of it, and then these huge trails of
it looked like rockets basically. And it went very slowly.
We though it was like a satellite breaking up or a plane even, or something like that, and we were actually expecting a big bang.
ANNE BARKER: Steve Kelly says he's never seen anything like it
STEVE KELLY: I reckon, the amount of sky it took up, it must have been hundreds of kilometres wide. It was like, you know, four or five degrees of the sky, from horizon to horizon.
ANNE BARKER: And even the experts were at a loss to explain the unusual phenomenon. Astronomer Peter Birch at the Perth Observatory says it could be several days before anyone knows just what it was.
PETER BIRCH: I think it's most likely a piece of space junk a disused spacecraft or an old rocket casing or something like that. It would be most unusual for a meteor to be seen over the time that people are reporting to us.
And everybody is telling us approximately the same duration of sighting. Meteors tend to fairly short-lived, for maybe up to five seconds, but most people have reported this between 40 seconds and a minute.
ANNE BARKER: How would you find out then, what it is?
PETER BIRCH: Well, we've got to go back to the records for satellites that are in orbit around earth, and see what satellite would have been on an orbit, putting it in that position at that particular time.
EDMOND ROY: Astronomer Peter Birch at the Perth Observatory speaking to Anne Barker in Darwin.