Last weekend, an extremely luminous “fireball”, 40 times brighter than the full moon, crossed the skies over Alabama during the early hours on Friday, August 17.
The meteorite passed by at 12:19 AM local time, according to NASA Meteor Watch, which captured the video of the event and shared it on Facebook , calling the meteor the “Alabama Fireball.”
Six NASA cameras in the region captured the fiery object, a small asteroid that measured approximately 2 meters in diameter. The fireball was large enough and bright enough to be seen easily with the naked eye, even through the clouds, and managed to activate “all the cameras and sensors operated by the Meteoroid Environment Bureau in the region”, according to NASA.
The meteor was discovered at an altitude of 93 kilometers (58 miles) above Turkeytown, Alabama. From there, it burned a fiery trail in the sky as it headed west at an estimated speed of 86,422 km/h (53,700 miles/hour), disintegrating about 29 km (18 miles) over Grove Oak, Alabama, NASA reported.
A statement from NASA said:
“We are still evaluating the probability that the fireball has produced meteorites that have reached the ground. ”
The Earth is constantly bombarded by natural space debris, thousands of rock fragments enter the atmosphere each year, but 90 to 95 percent of the objects shatter before approaching the surface of our planet.
Recently, the Perseid meteor shower which is an annual event, visible in the Northern Hemisphere during the month of August, commenced its own intense light show, producing between 60 to 70 “shooting stars” per hour from August 11 to August 13.
Friday’s meteor exploded harmlessly during its fiery descent over Alabama, but the state is also known as the site of a much more intense and mysterious close encounter with a space object. On November 30, 1954, a piece of meteorite plummeted through the roof of a house in Sylacuaga and hit a woman named Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges who was napping on her couch, leaving her a large bruise, according to NASA.
