Bill Cooke, the lead at NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, said data indicated that a meteor was moving west at roughly 85,000 miles per hour.
DALLAS — North Texas sky watchers were in for a treat earlier this week. NASA confirmed that a fireball was observed west of Dallas on Tuesday night at 10:13 p.m.
Bill Cooke, the lead at NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, said data indicated that a meteor was moving west at roughly 85,000 miles per hour. It then disintegrated 44 miles in the air, somewhere between Dallas and Abilene, according to the NASA data.
Cooke said the fireball’s brightness and high speed “suggest that it was too small and too fast to produce meteorites on the ground.” Fireballs that drop meteorites are “typically as bright as the full Moon” and move a lot slower, less than 20,000 miles per hour, Cooke said.
In any case, if you were outside at the right time Tuesday night, you might have experienced a fairly rare occurrence. According to the American Meteor Society, a few thousand meteors happen in Earth’s atmosphere every day. But most of them aren’t seen, either because they’re over oceans or uninhabited areas, or they happen during daylight.
A meteor occurs when a meteoroid — a rock in space — enters the Earth’s atmosphere at a high speed and burns up, creating the fireball or “shooting star” effect, according to NASA.
