Managed to catch a #meteorite on my doorbell camera 😏 https://t.co/24FlUBuehB#Calgary #Alberta
— Tim Wiebe (@tim_wiebe) February 9, 2020
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.The American Meteor Society (AMS) received 101 reports of the event.
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.
Comment: Based on past actual pandemics such as 'the Black Death' about 600 years ago, and the 'Justinian Plague' about 600 years before that, which recorded mortality rates of up to 70% in some localities, this coronavirus is not at the level of 'global pandemic'. We will all know if or when such an event is happening...
One criticism we have of Professor Wickramasinghe's theory is that he may be reaching by trying to pin it on a specific, recent meteor event over China. That strikes us as being too linear, based on what he himself has written in the past - concerning the origins of SARS in 2003, funnily enough - about China being a catchment area for new viral material because of its proximity to the Himalayas and a zone of thin atmosphere... It seems more plausible to us that, because meteors can and do detonate anywhere, viruses or virus DNA they carry in their particles swirl all the way around the planet and then (tend to) settle to ground level through the 'Chinese opening'. That may only be a general rule, however, as some meteors probably do penetrate all the way through to the troposphere, and certainly some of their meteorites make it all the way to the ground.
However, the primary factor motivating our reporting on the increase in meteor events is not the risk they present from impacting the ground and causing immediate global catastrophe, which is thankfully rare on a civilizational timescale, but because of the far more potent danger they present of delivering new viruses against which there is no defense.
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