Here are some facts for this day. You are welcome to log your interesting, quirky or fun fact/s with your log.
On This Day - March 28th 2008
A strange object found on an outback property in Queensland is identified as 'space junk'.
Charleville is a town in western Queensland, some 750 km west of the Brisbane, the state's capital. Around 80km from Charleville is the small town of Cheepie which, although it once boasted a police station, blacksmith, railway station, tent boarding houses, butcher shop, bakery and two vegetable gardens, is now just a ghost town.
On 7 November 2007, Cheepie farmer James Stirton found a 20kg burnt and unidentifiable object on his 40,500-hectare property. He noticed the object was about 54 cm in length, hollow, and covered in a carbon-fibre material. Stirton took it in to the Charleville school, where staff requested that a representative from the Brisbane Planetarium come and examine it. The identity of the object was confirmed on 28 March 2008 by Brisbane Planetarium curator Mark Rigby. The item, named 2006-047-C, was identified as a helium or nitrogen tank from a rocket which had been used to launch a US solar satellite into space in October 2006.
There is an estimated 5000 tonnes of space junk obiting the Earth at any given time, so falling space junk is more common than people realise.