MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

By Ben Sutherly, The Columbus Dispatch – “The brilliant streak seen on Friday night in the skies over central Ohio was a piece of an asteroid or comet that was 2 to 3 feet across and hit the atmosphere at 113,000 mph, a NASA official said yesterday.

The bright flash of light at 11:33 p.m. prompted some people to call Columbus police to ask what it was while officers chatted about the event over their radios.

‘The initial trajectory suggests it passed over Columbus, Ohio, moving slightly north of west,’ Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office told The Dispatch in an email. Cooke said there were some reports of sounds similar to sonic booms, which suggests some of the fireball’s fragments made it to fairly low altitudes.

NASA’s meteor cameras in Ohio and Pennsylvania first detected it at 67 miles up, and it began breaking apart 41 miles above the earth. Cooke said it’s not yet certain, but it’s unlikely that the fireball produced meteorites on the ground given the ‘tremendous’ speed at which it was moving.

‘The fireball was so bright our meteor-detection software ‘went home to momma’ and thought it was seeing lightning,’ Cooke wrote. ‘The fireball lit up the sky, so the detection software thought it was lightning and did not flag it as a meteor/fireball.’

According to the American Meteor Society’s website, Ohio was ground zero for the sighting. The society’s fireball coordinator, Robert Lunsford, said the fireball already had generated 900 reports to the society’s website, making it the third-most reported meteor event since the group began tracking them in 2005.

‘It seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime thing,’ said Sandi Poyer of Pickerington. ‘We camp out a lot. We’ve just never seen anything like that.'” Read more.