Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Dash camera image of the fireball in South Carolina.
Image credit: Newton County Sheriff’s Office

Just in time for Asteroid Day!

That bright fireball that skimmed through the midday skies on June 26 shook-up folks in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

According to experts, the fireball was produced by an asteroidal fragment three feet in diameter, weighing over a ton.

That’s the word from Bill Cooke, lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Image credit: Lowell Observatory

Camera, satellite, infrasound, and radar data

“Our analysis of eyewitness accounts and camera, satellite, infrasound, and doppler weather radar data yielded the following information about the event,” Cooke states.

The meteor was first seen at an altitude of 48 miles above the town of Oxford, Georgia, Cooke adds, moving southwest at 30,000 miles per hour.

“It disintegrated 27 miles above West Forest, Georgia, unleashing an energy of about 20 tons of TNT. The resulting pressure wave propagated to the ground, creating booms heard by many in that area,” Cooke notes.

Image credit: U.S. National Weather Service/Peachtree, Georgia

Home encounter

It appears that a piece of the meteor may have fallen through a roof in Henry County, Georgia.

Meteor damage from the event to a home has been reported by the U.S. National Weather Service in Peachtree, Georgia. It posted on its Facebook page that there were reports of roof damage, seemingly caused by the fireball.

Image credit: U.S. National Weather Service/Peachtree, Georgia

The Henry County Emergency Management Agency adds that the suspect cosmic debris “broke through the roof, then the ceiling, before cracking the laminate on the floor and stopping.”