meteor kiev april 2023
© BBCThe bright glow was observed in the sky over Kiev, Ukraine around 22:00 local time on April 19, 2023
Ukrainian space officials said on Thursday that a bright flash that lit up the sky over Kyiv late Wednesday probably came from a meteorite entering the atmosphere and not a NASA satellite or a Russian military attack.

Ukraine has been under an invasion by the Russian military since February 2022 but the country's space officials said the bright glow observed over its capital was more related to a cosmic body entering Earth's atmosphere.


"'High energy acoustic event," main center of special control at Ukrainian Space Agency. It took place yesterday over Kyiv at 21:57," said Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to Ukraine's Minister of Internal Affairs, said in a Twitter post. "A cosmic body entered the dense atmosphere layers. [The] estimated explosion location is in [the] Kyiv region."


Air alerts had gone in the central and eastern regions of Ukraine at the time, causing concerns that the flash was part of a Russian attack. The Ukrainian Air Force said it had destroyed about 10 Iranian-made exploding drones in southeastern Ukraine at about the same time as the flash.

Some believed the flash may have come from a decommissioned NASA satellite that was reentering the Earth's atmosphere, but the U.S. space agency said that was not the case.

NASA's retired Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager, or RHESSI, satellite didn't re-enter the atmosphere until hours later on Wednesday. NASA said it expected most of the 660-pound spacecraft to burn up upon reentry with only of few of its components surviving.