Fireball outshines moon, A dazzlingly bright fireball lit up the skies over the American South last week, and NASA caught the dramatic action on video.
The meteor blazed up in the predawn hours of Aug. 28, putting on a brief but spectacular show for night owls in several southeastern states.
"Recorded by all six NASA cameras in the Southeast, this fireball was one of the brightest observed by the network in 5 years of operations," Bill Cooke, head of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., wrote in a blog post Tuesday (Sept. 3). "From Chickamauga, Georgia, the meteor was 20 times brighter than the full moon; shadows were cast on the ground as far south as Cartersville." [See video of last week's super-bright meteor]
The asteroid that sparked the sky show was probably about 2 feet wide and weighed more than 100 pounds, Cooke added. The space rock hit Earth's atmosphere above the Georgia/Tennessee border at 3:27 a.m. EDT (0727 GMT) on Aug. 28, moving northeast at 56,000 mph.
The meteor began to break apart in the skies northeast of Ocoee, Tenn., at an altitude of 33 miles, Cooke wrote.
"NASA cameras lost track of the fireball pieces at an altitude of 21 miles, by which time they had slowed to a speed of 19,400 mph," Cooke wrote. "Sensors on the ground recorded sound waves ('sonic booms') from this event, and there are indications on Doppler weather radar of a rain of small meteoritic particles falling to the ground east of Cleveland, Tennessee."
