A half-ton piece of space junk falls onto a village in Kenya

A glowing ring of metal, more than 8 feet in diameter and weighing more than 1,100 pounds, fell from the sky and crash-landed in a remote village in Kenya this week, causing no injuries but frightening residents who feared a bomb or worse.

The object turned out to be space debris — junk left over from six decades of space exploration and a growing number of commercial launches, the Kenya Space Agency said Wednesday. It identified the object as a separation ring from a launch rocket and said that it was investigating the ring’s origin and ownership.

“Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they reenter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans,” the space agency said, describing the incident as “an isolated case.”

While the agency offered assurances that the ring, since removed, posed no threat, people living in Mukuku village were still angered by the intrusion.

“We want the owner of this land to be compensated,” Paul Musili, a resident, told television news stations. “Since this object fell, we have not been sleeping.”

Space is getting crowded. Last year, the European Space Agency estimated that there were more than 14,000 tons of material in low Earth orbit. About a third of that is junk, according to Sara Webb, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

With about 110 new launches each year and at least 10 satellites or other objects a year breaking into smaller fragments, the amount will continue to increase, the space agency said. And more of these objects are falling back down to Earth without breaking up on reentry as they are expected to.

While the size of the debris that fell over Kenya was exceptional, there are at least 40,500 objects larger than 4 inches in orbit, and millions of smaller pieces.