Bright Flash Over Homel And Mozyr: What Was It?

• 20.04.2023, 7:45

Kyiv has also witnessed the unusual phenomenon.

As Charter97.org reported, a bright flash was detected in the sky over Homel and Mozyr last night.

Observers noticed a light flash of yellow-blue or yellow-green colour. The flash was observed southwards from Homel and south-eastwards from Mozyr. This effect was visible for about three seconds.

At about the same time, many people registered a powerful flash over Kyiv. A few minutes later, an air-raid alert was declared.

Later, the head of the Kyiv military administration, Serhiy Popko, explained that the flash in the sky was caused by a falling NASA satellite.

"Around 10pm, a bright glow of an aerial object was visible in the sky within Kyiv. According to preliminary information, the phenomenon was the result of a NASA space satellite falling to Earth. To prevent casualties from falling debris, an aerial alert was declared. Air defence was not working," Popko said in a statement.

However, the US space agency NASA said that the flash over Homel and Kyiv late on the night of 19 April was not a RHESSI satellite crash.

This device was indeed supposed to have entered the atmosphere, but the trajectory of its fall is not comparable to the coordinates of Kyiv and Ukraine as a whole. Moreover, the entry did not take place that day, BBC reports.

"The satellite was still on orbit when the flash was observed and will return to Earth's atmosphere at night," NASA Communications Office spokesman Rob Margetta said.

He stressed that NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense continue to monitor RHESSI.

Note that the RHESSI spacecraft, used to monitor solar flares, was launched into low-Earth orbit in 2002 and decommissioned in 2018.