New Year’s bolid fireball seen over New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, US
Image credit: TW
The bright fireball streaked over the southwestern USA on Jan. 1st at 03:15 UTC. It was visible from Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. Thomas Ashcraft managed to take some images and video from his rural observatory outside of Santa Fe by operating a combination all-sky camera/forward-scatter meteor radar system.
NASA’s All-Sky Fireball Network cameras also recorded the fireball from multiple locations. An orbit calculated from those data show that the fireball was a random meteoroid hailing from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It hit Earth’s atmosphere at 26 km/s (58,000 mph), which is relatively slow compared to other meteoroids, and disintegrated 82 km above Earth’s surface.
You can check for more info at LunarMeteoriteHunters blogsite.
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