Weird glitch after trying to land debris

[Crunchy]

While I was going for a quick flight to do some research, and eventually I tried to land my command module, which was with a Science Jr. I can never land these for some reason, so I tried to decouple the Science Jr. and let it parachute down by itself. Once it reached about a few kilometers above land, I think I remember it being launched very fast to the side ( I can't remember very well).

I went to the tracking station to see what happened, and for a split second it was just above the ocean, then it suddenly shot up to space, and the speed of this thing was insane, but it's altitude wasn't changing.

I checked out the rest of the debris in the tracking station, and I saw that some were on their way out of the solar system, and one of them even left the solar and went very far. Here are some images:
                                                                            ........ In the first image, I was going very fast despite my altitude and notice the atmosphere meter contradicting my altitude.
In the second image, you can see that that my Science Jr. and radial mount drogue chute were destroyed to some extreme heats, along with the structural linkage failure on everything.
In the third image, you can see that some debris has left the solar system. It's speed is only going up.
In the fourth image, I think some debris is escaping the sun's gravity.
I recently installed MechJeb2, however it was slightly outdated so that may have been the cause.
Sorry in advance if this is the wrong place to post.

[jimmymcgoochie]

That’s a standard Kraken attack- the game’s physics engine can trip over itself and propel you to impossible speeds instantly, which is bad news if you’re in an atmosphere and very bad if Kerbals are on board. If you have a save from before it happened, try loading that and reflying the mission.

If you only want to recover the science data, use a science lunchbox experiment recovery cubit, which can store science experiments and samples and is much more heat-resistant than the science parts themselves. If you’re trying to recover the science jr for a refund/reuse, ugly need to design your rocket carefully as the weight balance is tricky with a big but fairly light science jr under your pod; put a small fuel tank (FL-T100) under the science jr with the fuel feeds switched off to act as ballast and to protect the science jr from heat conducted through the heat shield.

Also- never go to the tracking station when you have something you want to keep, deep inside an atmosphere: the game will automatically erase everything below ~25km over Kerbin when it’s outside of physics range (~2.5km from the active vessel’s root part I believe); map view is OK for the vessel you’re controlling, but in the tracking station the physics engine is purely ‘on rails’ and so nothing is active, so everything gets destroyed.

If you want to recover stuff by just lobbing it into the lower atmosphere with some parachutes stuck to it, and to recover dropped booster stages too, try the Stage Recovery mod which can scoop up those ‘destroyed’ objects as well as any Kerbals and science on board and recover them  as if you had flown them down to the surface yourself. There are plenty of customisable options around how much of a refund you get for recovery, chances of burning up during re-entry and so on so it’s a versatile and easy to use little mod that can really help a cash-strapped early space program.

Edited January 5, 2021 by jimmymcgoochie

[NH04]

I had this happen to me once. Don't worry about it- unless it destroys your save- or the debris cost a lot of funds and you are playing in a hardcore career mode. See jimmymcgoochie's post for better info. 

(I didn't want to use a user ping, so that is why the username is in bold)