Mick Miners was herding sheep on a four-wheeler last week when he stumbled upon a pointy black object that looked more than 9 feet tall. It reminded him of either a burned tree or a piece of farm machinery.
“Pretty frightening, actually,” Miners, 48, said by phone on Thursday from his roughly 5,000-acre property in a remote corner of southeastern Australia.
“I was quite surprised,” he added. “It’s not something you see every day on a sheep farm.”
Miners took a picture and sent it to a neighboring farmer, Jock Wallace, who happened to have discovered a similarly mysterious object on his farm a few days earlier.
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It was space debris.
The U.S. space agency, NASA, said in a statement that SpaceX confirmed that the object was likely the remaining part of the jettisoned trunk segment from a Dragon spacecraft used during the Crew-1 mission’s return from the International Space Station in May last year. “If you believe you have identified a piece of debris, please do not attempt to handle or retrieve the debris,” NASA said.
Read more: The New York Times
