Posted on 04/28/2022 11:34:49 AM PDT by Red Badger
Loud fireball spotted over southern Mississippi mostly heard, hardly seen. A fiery meteor streaked across the morning skies in southern Mississippi yesterday, April 27, 2022.
More than 30 eyewitnesses in the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi reported seeing a bright fireball at 8:03 a.m. CDT. The sighting was soon followed by numerous reports of loud booms heard in Claiborne County, Mississippi, and surrounding counties.
Approximately 22,000 miles out in space, NOAA’s Geostationary Lightning Mappers (GLM) onboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) 16 and 17 detected several bright flashes associated with the fragmentation of this bolide, or exceptionally bright meteor, which was first spotted 54 miles above the Mississippi River near the town of Alcorn, Mississippi.
“This is one of the nicer events I have seen in the GLM data,” said Bill Cooke, lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Fireball ground track from eyewitness accounts. Credit: NASA/American Meteor Society
The object – thought to be a piece of an asteroid about a foot (~30 centimeters) in diameter with a weight of 90 pounds (~40 kg) – moved southwest at a speed of 55,000 miles per hour (~90,000 kilometers per hour), breaking into pieces as it descended deeper into Earth’s atmosphere. It disintegrated about 34 miles (55 kilometers) above the swampy area north of Minorca in Louisiana.
The fragmentation of this fireball generated an energy equivalent of 3 tons of TNT (trinitrotoluene), which created shock waves that propagated to the ground, producing the booms and vibrations felt by people in the area.
At its peak, the fireball was over 10 times brighter than the Full Moon.
“What struck me as unusual was how few eyewitness reports we had given the skies were so clear,” said Cooke. “More people heard it than saw it.”
Ping!................
55,000?
Meanwhile the metor is saying:
“I can’t drive 55!”
Neither can Sammy Hagar!..............
How could they tell it was streaking? I didn’t know meteors wore clothing.
Heads up!
Did it get a speeding ticket?
If it were larger and had hit the District of Criminals.....
Is this related to the big asteroid which NASA said was going to do a near-earth fly-by?
BS
How did they come up with that number?
That’s what I was wondering. Asteroid was estimated to fly by us sometime today.
You are very right. And you have to be looking in the correct direction and azimuth.
About 10 or 15 years ago, I was lucky enough to see a bolide over the San Francisco Peninsula. I was driving home westbound on CA-237 and it dropped out of the sky right over the hills to the west of me. It flashed with spectacular green/blue colors, looked like it was breaking up, and it was gone in less than two seconds. If it had been elsewhere around me or higher up, I would have missed it.
First thing I thought of was Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Those Mississippi cops and their RADAR guns are everywhere............
One can only hope.
Mississippi DMV radar gun, of course.
That was no rock. That was a Russian nuke that went haywire and missed.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.