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PITTSBURGH — A 500-pound meteor put on a show early Tuesday morning.
The fireball’s journey was captured by three of NASA’s meteor cameras, which belong to the agency’s All-sky Fireball Network. It entered Earth’s atmosphere at 4:50 a.m. EST in western Pennsylvania and could be seen from Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, according to NASA Meteor Watch.
Researchers estimated the fireball was about 2 feet in diameter and traveled at a speed of 45,000 miles per hour. An animation of the fireball’s orbit can be viewed online.
“It flared brighter than the full moon before the cameras lost track of it at an altitude of 13 miles above the town of Kittanning; there may be fragments (meteorites) scattered on the ground east of that location,” a post on the NASA Meteor Watch Facebook page reads. “This celestial visitor had an orbit that took it out to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It came a mighty long way to a fiery end in the predawn Pennsylvania sky.”
Fireballs are classified as meteors that appear brighter than the planet Venus, according to NASA.
