NASA has caught breathtaking images of a giant fireball making its way across the moon.
In a short, but dramatic video, a meteor much brighter than the moon dazzled the night sky. Bill Cooke, head of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., wrote in a blog post about the breathtaking event:
Early Wednesday morning, at 3:27:20 AM Eastern Time, a piece of an asteroid, about 2 feet in diameter and weighing over 100 pounds, entered Earth's atmosphere above the Georgia/Tennessee border, just south of Cleveland. The meteor was moving northeast at 56,000 miles per hour, and began to break apart north east of Ocoee, at an altitude of 33 miles. A second, fragmentation occurred less than half a second later, at an altitude of 29 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. 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.
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. From Chickamauga, Georgia, the meteor was 20 times brighter than the Full Moon; shadows were cast on the ground as far south as Cartersville.
NASA has handed out pretty stellar footage in the past, and we can expect more from their rover, Curiosity, who will embarking on a solo mission to Mars using its
new autonomous navigation system. It will use its "autonav" system to analyze images obtained during its travels to map out a safe course to the red planet.
Though NASA has yet to release a date for the rover's next mission, since the testing of Curiosity's newest capabilities occurred on Aug. 27, one might assume it is happening in the near future.
Cool, right? What do you think about the fireball? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below.
