From Russia with love and it landed with a thud
6:33 PM, Apr 13, 2011
MOFFAT COUNTY - Bob Dunn has been hiking through the sagebrush and juniper-filled northwest plateau of Colorado for 50 years. Most everyday he finds something interesting. A lot of the time he finds deer and elk antlers shed by the animals in the winter and spring.
"Its like an Easter egg hunt. There's no telling what you're going to run into," Dunn said.
On March 21, he ran into something a lot more unusual than antlers.
Dunn was hiking in an area a few miles south of the Colorado-Wyoming border about 50 miles north of Craig when a strange sound got his attention.
"I was walking along and there was an odd noise," Dunn said. "I listened and that was it, just a short noise and a high pitched scrape."
A short time later he saw what is believed to be the source of the sound. Sitting in a small crater was a metallic sphere about 30 inches in diameter.
"I had a pretty good idea that it was something very unusual," Dunn said. "I looked down at it and looked up and said to myself, 'This thing fell out of the sky.'"
He contacted the Moffat County Sheriff's Department and a deputy was able to determine the sphere didn't pose a hazardous materials threat. While they were examining the object, they noticed some writing in a foreign language.
It was Russian.
Dunn was able to contact an expert with the NASA's Orbital Space Debris program who identified the object as a tank on the Russian Federation's Zenit-3 SLBF launch vehicle. It is used as part of the vehicle's pressurization system.
A spokesperson for NASA, William Jeffs, says they believe the finding is linked to a January launch by the Russians.
"The timing and location of the discovery and Cyrillic markings on the tank have let to an association with the Zenit re-entry," Jeffs said.
NASA says the Russian rocket re-entered the atmosphere over Los Angeles.
Dunn is now keeping the 70-pound titanium tank in a storage space, while he tries to figure out what to do with it.
"It belongs to the Russians," Dunn said with a laugh. "So it is up to them. I don't know if they would like a piece of space junk back or not. For me, maybe a letter asking for it back from one of the Russian ministries that I could put on my wall would probably be better than having this great big piece of space debris."
(KUSA-TV © 2011 Multimedia Holdings Corporation)
