On February 8, 2024 at 23:48:00 local time, the Subaru-Asahi Star Camera at the Maunakea Observatory in Hawaii, owned by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, recorded a video of a meteor fireball blazing across the night sky. The object that burned in the Earth’s atmosphere was identified as a reentering Chinese satellite, named Object K. This name sounds Kafkaesque. But sticking to the dry facts, Object K’s fireball represents Nature’s way of cleaning up human-made space trash.
Not all human-made space trash is eliminated so quickly. For example, Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster which was launched to space as a dummy payload on the Falcon Heavy test flight in 2018, will continue on an elliptic orbit around the Sun for tens of millions of years.