Spectacular meteor fireball over Southern California was small asteroid or comet fragment, NOT space debris re-entry

abc7.com
Thu, 30 Jan 2020 12:32 UTC

Residents in Southern California were treated to a bright sight Wednesday night, prompting many to take to social media.

An apparent meteor flashed over the region and was caught on camera.

On social media, residents took video of the large bright light resembling a meteor as it flashed across the night sky.

Video from a person in San Diego showed streaking lights as it broke into several smaller pieces and dropped out of sight.

Several Southern California residents called into the ABC7 newsroom saying they saw the apparent meteor.

Comment: On February 1st, NASA's spaceweather.com reported:

On Jan. 30th around 10:30 pm PST, a spectacular fireball crawled across the skies of southern California. In Los Angeles and San Diego, millions of people watched it fragment into dozens of pieces high overhead. But what was it? Initial speculation focused on decaying space junk. The slow pace of the fireball combined with its fragmentation--as if parts of a satellite were breaking off in the atmosphere--suggested an orbital decay event. It appears, however, that the fireball was something else entirely.

Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office has triangulated data from multiple cameras that picked up the fireball. His conclusion: It did not come from Earth. Instead, the fireball was a small asteroid or comet fragment belonging to the Apollo/Jupiter family. It was orbiting the sun when Earth got in the way, hitting our planet at a speed of 15.5 km/s (~35,000 mph). For comparison, manmade objects in low-Earth orbit typically hit at 7.9 km/s (17,700 mph) when they decay.

The American Meteor Society (AMS) received 101 reports of the event.