UFO or Russian Mayak Satellite? What Is It?

On July 14, an amateur group in Russia launched a small satellite called Mayak. They said it would become the “brightest shooting star” in the sky. Why’d they do it? Here’s how to look for it.

A team of young Russians – led by Moscow State Mechanical Engineering University (MAMI) – managed to raise more than $30,000 on Russian crowdfunding website Boomstarter, in order to launch their own small satellite. The satellite is called Mayak, which means beacon in English. It’s a cubesat, roughly the size of a loaf of bread. And it’s up there. Mayak went into space on July 14, 2017, as part of a secondary payload, launched on a Soyuz 2.1v vehicle from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It’ll be orbiting Earth, about 370 miles (600 km) high, for the coming month. It’s supposed to be very, very bright, so bright that it would, supposedly, ruin night skies and threaten astronomy.

Satellite tracking websites like Heavens Above are already trying to follow it, hoping to offer information on Mayak’s passes over various parts of the world. Heavens Above commented:

A new small satellite has just been launched which will deploy a large reflector once in orbit and has the potential to be very bright. We now have a provisional orbit from Space-Track which you can use to generate predictions. Please note that the magnitude estimates are possibly very inaccurate until actual observations are reported.

Plus Mayak has its own app, available to those who back the project.
We haven’t heard yet from anyone who’s actually seen it.