A strikingly bright fireball outshone the moon and lit up South American predawn skies last week, and NASA caught the rare event on video.
According to Yahoo!, the fiery meteor blazed up in the predawn hours of Aug. 28, and several southeastern states are the best areas to view the spectacular rare event.
"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," Head of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama Bill Cooke wrote in a Tuesday blog post. "From Chickamauga, Georgia, the meteor was 20 times brighter than the full moon; shadows were cast on the ground as far south as Cartersville."
Cooke added that the asteroid was about 2 feet wide and possibly weighed more than 100 pounds. He also noted that the fireball that outshone the moon, moving northeast at 56,000 mph, landed on the Earth's atmosphere above the Georgia/Tennessee border at around 3:27 p.m. EDT on Aug. 28.
The space rock was said to have broken apart in the skies northeast of Ocoee, Tennessee at an altitude of 33 miles.
"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."
Space.com reported that more than 100 tons of material: grains of dust and asteroid and comet pieces, bombards the Earth's atmosphere every day. However, all of these materials are consumed after burning in the atmosphere, sometimes even creating bright streaks many people refer to as meteors and shooting stars.
Reports stated that if a meteor blazes more brightly than Venus in the sky, it can be classified as a fireball.
Meanwhile, NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office has set up a network of cameras used in tracking and studying fireballs to better understand where their parent space rocks come from. The study is intended to help spacecraft designers.
As of late, the All-sky Fireball Network of the space agency consists of 12 cameras. Six are located in the Southeast (across Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia) while the rest are spread in pairs in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New Mexico.
Space.com is encouraging people, who managed to take a photo of the fireball to submit a copy to its managing editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com for the official image gallery on the rare event.
© 2017 Jobs & Hire All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
