Can an astronaut make a fireworks like meteor shower by tossing a large bag of sand into the Earth at night?

It would have to be a real fucking big bag, but yes. A truckload of gravel would be better though.

Oooh, can we try it?

@RedDeerGuy1, with all the questions you’ve asked, what took you so long with this one?

Probably not. The grains of sand would indeed burn up on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, but they are so small that we would likely never see them. @Blackwater_Park is closer with the idea of gravel. But all you would see from the ground is small “shooting stars”.

No. Any sand they toss out of the space station would remain in the same orbit as the space station. They would need to impart enough retrograde delta-v to the sand to deorbit it. Which according to this, is about 90 m/s.
For you colonials, that is 1610.59 furlongs per hour.

Loli is correct of course. Also, they would never bring up a bag of sand because it’s too expensive. But that aside, it’s an interesting question. I wonder if they had, say, a shotgun and shot it retrograde to the space station (assuming that the momentum wouldn’t hurl them away from the space station) I do wonder if the shotgun pellets would deorbit.

Actually Loli’s link has the answer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxNJoaBLLNM&t=141s

Meteors are shooting into the atmosphere with serious extraplanetary velocity, not just falling in our gravity well from a relatively low orbit plus a push.

As loli says, unless you shoot it out real fast, it will just contribute to the large amount of space debris. Even the current amount of junk orbiting the Earth may eventually lead to the Kessler Syndrome, where it is unsafe to travel because of all the high speed particles.

Again, meteors are objects from outside earth orbit, coming in on their own orbital trajectory, plus whatever earth gravity adds to the closing velocity, which comes out to about 11 to 72 kilometers per second – which is vastly faster than any speed you can get from dropping or throwing (or even shooting, unless you devise some high-tech railgun or something) an object from a low orbit like the ISS’.

That’s why meteors appear as brief streaks in the night sky.

Maybe. But the sand (or gravel) would have to be thrown violently backwards opposite orbital rotation so that the sand would orbit slower than the spaceman so that the sand would fall back into the Earth’s atmosphere and not just continue to orbit at the same speed as the astronaut.

@kritiper As Loli’s link discusses, yeah, if you can “violently throw” something at the speed of a hard-hit golf ball, about 300 kilometers per HOUR, you could get it to gradually fall out of orbit… though it would still be flying sideways relative to the earth at something like 17,800 kilometers per hour, and slip into the atmosphere’s outer layers, slowly heating up.

Meanwhile, a meteor streaks in at 11 to 72 kilometers per SECOND, which is between 40,000 and 260,000 kilometers per hour, coming more or less directly in to the planet.

Here is an ESA space freighter burning up during re-entry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhBw5yaR_SU

@Zaku True enough. But no astronaut is going to be able to toss a meteor at ANY speed, much less catch one, if you follow the OP’s question verbatim.
Oh. And I did say “maybe.”

I think having a method of external release to dump just before leaving the atmosphere would have a better chance.

You could try dumping it at the apoapsis right before the circularisation burn, or during the burn, before the periapsis becomes too big.

A spacecraft circling the Earth at 17,000 MPH will burn up on re-entry, so why not some sand and/or gravel?

“Maybe” an astronaut could “catch” a meteor… exactly once…