HALIFAX - A large piece of a Russian rocket that successfully lifted a satellite into space last week crashed somewhere off the coast of Labrador within 36 hours of its launch, Norad officials confirmed Monday.
Lt.-Cmdr. Gary Ross, a U.S. navy spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defence Command, said the launch and re-entry of the rocket body was routine.
"Officials from our command deemed it not a threat to populated land areas," he said in an interview from Norad headquarters at Colorado Springs, Colo. "We just monitored it until it landed in the ocean."
Ross said the rocket lifted off on Christmas Day from Kazakhstan.
Norad officials at Peterson Air Force Base tracked the spent rocket as it re-entered the atmosphere over Labrador and crashed in the North Atlantic, he said.
The space junk was about 20 square metres in size, but Ross couldn't say exactly where it splashed down.
Ross said it was unclear what type of satellite the rocket was carrying.
"That's not something we would track anyways," he said.
According to the website space.com, the Proton-M rocket was carrying one of three, new Glonass global navigation satellites produced by the Russian space agency.
Glonass is Russia's equivalent of the Global Positioning System set up by the U.S. Defence Department. Both systems use a constellation of satellites to provide navigation data to military and civilian users.
The website quoted Sergei Ivanov, Russia's deputy prime minister in charge of technology, as saying the 24 satellites used by the Glonass system will provide navigation accuracy to within 1 metre.
The rocket was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the same site where Sputnik I -- the world's first artificial satellite -- was launched in 1957.
