Bright fireballs appear somewhere on Earth every day.  Most are caused by rocky asteroids. On Friday, May 20th, however, a less common object struck.  

Sky watchers in the southeastern USA watched a big but fragile piece of comet break apart in Earth’s atmosphere. The resulting fireball was the brightest meteor observed in nearly 3 years by NASA’s all-sky network of meteor cameras.  


Plots showing reports of the meteor prepared by the American Meteor Society. Clicking the map image will launch an interactive Google Map for this event.

A six-foot diameter fragment of an unknown comet entered the atmosphere approximately 66 miles above the city of Macon, Ga., traveling northwest at a speed of some 24 miles per second (86,000 mph). At this velocity, the boulder-sized “dirty snowball” possessed an energy or striking power somewhere between 500-1000 tons of TNT.

This was seen by many eyewitnesses in Georgia and Alabama; the American Meteor Society has some of the reports here.

The meteor was tracked by two NASA all sky cameras, one located in Chickamauga, Ga., and the other at the Tellus Science Museum in the town of Cartersville, Ga. Analysis of the video data from these cameras enabled the Meteoroid Environment Office to estimate the trajectory, speed, mass and orbit of the meteor. More information on these cameras and a log of recent meteor events can be found at: http://fireballs.ndc.nasa.gov.

Fortunately the atmosphere provided Earth with excellent protection, as the video below illustrates. Because the video is slowed to one-third of the actual real-time speed, it’s easy to spot the large fragments coming off in the wake after the flares.

The video shows four distinct flares caused by the meteor breaking apart in its fiery final few seconds. You can see fragments coming off in the meteor’s wake after three of these flares. After a last burst of light, the meteor ablated — or “burned up” — 38 miles above the town of Villa Rica, Ga., located on the border between Carrol and Douglas counties in Georgia.


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May 20, 2011 Meteor Videos:

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