Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Chelyabinsk sky rendering is a reconstruction of the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia on Feb. 15, 2013. Scientific study of the airburst has provided information about the origin, trajectory and power of the explosion. This simulation of the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion by Mark Boslough was rendered by Brad Carvey using the CTH code on Sandia National Laboratories’ Red Sky supercomputer. Andrea Carvey composited the wireframe tail. Photo by Olga Kruglova.
Credit: Sandia National Laboratories.

An agreement between NASA and the U.S. Space Force recently authorized the public release of decades of data collected by U.S. government sensors on fireball events – large bright meteors also known as bolides.

This action results from collaboration between NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) and the U.S. Space Force to continue furthering our nation’s efforts in planetary defense, which include finding, tracking, characterizing, and cataloging near-Earth objects (NEOs).

NASA’s Lindley Johnson is head of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
Credit: Leonard David

Events

Recently a small asteroid designated 2022 EB5 approximately 2 meters in size was detected in space as it approached Earth and impacted the atmosphere southwest of Jan Mayen, a Norwegian island nearly 300 miles (470 kilometers) off the east coast of Greenland and northeast of Iceland.

Another notable bolide event in this released data set is of a meteor that was detected on Jan. 8, 2014. This object gained the interest of the scientific community, as it has been posited it could have interstellar origin due to the detected event’s high velocity within the atmosphere.

Further analysis of this event carried out under U.S. Space Command’s purview confirmed the object’s high velocity impact, but the short duration of collected data, less than five seconds, makes it difficult to definitively determine if the object’s origin was indeed interstellar.

Space Force-operated Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites are a key part of North America’s early warning systems.
Credit: U.S. Space Force

Growing archive

The growing archive of bolide reports, as posted on the NASA Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) Fireballs website, “has significantly increased scientific knowledge and contributes to the White House approved National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan,” said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters.

“The release of these new bolide data demonstrates another key area of collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Space Force,” Johnson added, “and helps further the pursuit of improved capabilities for understanding these objects and our preparedness to respond to the impact hazard NEOs pose to Earth.”

For more information, go the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) fireballs database at:

https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/cneos.html