[sheeny (Al)]

The SpaceX Crew-1 Dragon Trunk, jettisoned just before the de-orbit burn in May 2021 re-entered the atmosphere over southern NSW and Victoria yesterday.


EarthquakesGA received multiple "felt" reports for an earthquake from Cooma, Albury and Wagga Wagga around 7:10am, but no earthquake was detected.


This was the first I'd heard about it, so if it wasn't an earthquake people were feeling, it must be infrasound. I checked the RSnB and confirmed no earthquake then looked at the helicorder of the infrasound trace for anything unusual or obviously not local.


The detected signal (below) was received at 7:23am. 13 minutes travel time at the speed of sound correlates to 270kms distance which is right in the middle of a triangle formed by Albury, Wagga and Cooma.


I posted results on the Australian Meteor Reports Facebook Page and from reports there found it was the SpaceX Crew-1 Trunk re-entry at 7:05am heading SE from near Balranald, past Euroa and Bendigo.


Given the event time of 7:05am and detection at 7:23am the detection distance was 370km.


The multiple reports on Australian Meteor Reports FB page are worth reading to get a picture of what people heard, felt and saw.


Interestingly, from a technical point of view, the Dominant Signal Period (DSP) was 0.5s, with only one period obviously larger at 0.6s which may be due to tumbling.

Al.