[Credit: Ron Garan, ISS Expedition 28 Crew, NASA]
Nice shot .. What is that bright orange-ish spot on the earth’s surface?
It’s almost right below the fan like structure (aerial?) of the space station.
I find the 60 km/sec number a little hard to credit. The escape velocity from the sun at the distance of the earth is 42.1 km/s, while the earth's orbital velocity is about 29.8 km/sec. Meteors and the earth do not collide “head on”, the meteors tend to orbit the sun in same direction as the earth. The motion of the meteor prior entering the atmosphere is almost perpendicular to the orbit of the earth and vector sum of their velocities would be about 50 km/sec, or a little less.
Viewing meteors from above the atmosphere does give confirmation to the experiments of a couple of 19th German amateur astronomers, who observed a meteor shower from points about 100 kilometers apart and correlated their observations to show that meteors occur about 100 miles above the surface of the earth. They did this by comparing the angular distance between the centers of the trails to well know stars and noting the changes between the two stations. (Tycho had famously demolished the long held belief that comets were atmospheric phenomena by demonstrating that they exhibited far less diurnal parallax than the moon, and were, therefore, much further away.)
Since zero scrapped the shuttle, how does Garan get back home?
I love it!