NASA’s Meteor Watch has confirmed that at least five fireballs were seen soaring through the sky over the US in one night. The team noted in a Facebook post that there were around 80 eyewitness accounts of a huge fireball moving across the North Carolina coast, which became visible at around 7:40 pm.
The giant space rock disintegrated after moving for around 26 miles through the upper atmosphere at an estimated speed of 32,000 mph. It’s unclear whether it was a single meteor that broke into multiple smaller fireballs during its descent, or if there were multiple meteors that blazed through the sky. The trajectories of the fireballs remain ambiguous.
More than 150 sighting reports
“There is more than the usual amount of uncertainty in the trajectory solution due to all the observers being located to the west of the fireball,” reads NASA’s post. There were around 150 reports of the fireballs across South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia. A video shared by Meteor Watch shows one of the massive fireballs burning bright in the sky.
“Several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth’s atmosphere each day,” as per the American Meteor Society’s FAQ on fireballs. “The vast majority of these, however, occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, and a good many are masked by daylight.”
Besides, finding large meteorites or their impact sites is easy to find on Earth; however, the smaller ones often go unnoticed. Only 2 percent of them are recovered by scientists. But, this is something that robots could do better than humans.
New tech to find small meteorites
Scientists have managed to create a system that allows autonomous drones to leverage machine learning and find the smaller meteorites in impact sites that go unnoticed or are inaccessible. The new technology will use a mix of convolutional neural networks to identify meteorites based on training images.
The system will have a set of images from both online as well as staged shots from the team’s collection. This will enable the system to differentiate between meteors and ordinary stones, even with a variety of shapes and terrain conditions.
