Fireball Outshines Moon Over American Southeast Sky; Brightest in Five Years (Video)

Fireball outshines moon as skies over the American Southwest were lit last week. NASA caught footage as the fireball outshines the moon. The fireball that outshines the moon was a meteor that blazed through the sky just before dawn on Aug. 28. The fireball outshines the moon only briefly, but put on a spectacular show over several southeastern states. A fireball is a meteor that shines brighter than Venus in the sky.

In a blog from Tuesday, September 3, the head of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., Bill Cooke wrote "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."

Cook said that the asteroid looked like a fireball was probably about 2 feet wide. The fireball weighed more than 100 pounds. The fireball hit the atmosphere of Earth's atmosphere above border of Georgia and Tennessee at 3:27 a.m. EDT GMT) on Aug. 28. The fireball was moving northeast at 56,000 mph. Cooke wrote that the fireball began to break up over Ocoee, Tenn. The fireball was about 33 miles high.

Cook wrote in his blog that "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."

Over 100 tons of material like grains of dust and spall pieces of asteroids and comets hit earth’s atmosphere every day. Most of these things burn up in the astmosphere sometimes causing fireballs, which was call meteors or shooting stars.

NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office has a network of twelve cameras that they have set up to track and study fireballs. Six cameras are in the Southeast states Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee and there are two cameras each in the states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Mexico NASA wants to understand where their parent space rocks are coming from. NASA officials say this information should be helpful in the design of spacecraft.

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