Minnesota Farmer Makes an Unusual 11-Foot Find

Corn wasn't the only thing ready for a fall harvest in one western Minnesota field. A farmer in Scott Township recently found an 11-foot-wide metal ring sitting among the stalks—debris that experts say almost certainly fell from a Chinese rocket that launched half a world away. Ars Technica reports the suspected upper stage of a Zhuque-2E rocket, built by Beijing-based LandSpace, reentered the atmosphere on Sept. 15 after deploying 10 satellites for China's rival to Starlink. Residents across Kansas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin reported seeing burning streaks in the sky that night.

"The incident was largely forgotten until the last few days," reports Ars Technica, when the farmer stumbled upon what the Stevens County Sheriff's Office described in an Oct. 15 Facebook post as "presumably a space object." Ars Technica reports that while it's not atypical for space debris to fall from orbit, the size of this object—"larger than most objects that survive reentry"—was unusual, as was the fact that it likely reached the field just hours after the rocket had launched, then sat undiscovered for six weeks, per KARE11. Futurism adds that "as launches get more common and rockets get larger and sturdier ... the chances of their detritus surviving the journey back to the ground increases."