An ‘earthgrazer’ flew ‘a whopping 186 miles’ over two states, then vanished, NASA says

A space object with an intimidating identify—”earthgrazer”—zoomed over Georgia and Alabama this week, providing witnesses a glimpse of one thing uncommon, NASA says.

“Earthgrazers” are fireball meteors with a trajectory so shallow that they skim lengthy distances throughout the upper atmosphere, NASA says.

“Very not often, they even ‘bounce off’ the atmosphere and head again out into space,” NASA Meteor Watch wrote on Facebook.

The fireball appeared Tuesday, Nov. 9, round 6:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, officers say, and was “detected by three NASA meteor cameras in the region.”

It entered the environment “at a very shallow angle—only 5 degrees from the horizontal.”

In reality, it was flying for thus lengthy that NASA needed to recalculate its information to find out how far it traveled throughout the planet.

“The meteor was first seen at an altitude of 55 miles above the Georgia town of Taylorsville, moving northwest at 38,500 miles per hour,” NASA says. Taylorsville is about 55 miles northwest of downtown Atlanta.

“Its path was so long that our automated software could not handle all the data. So we ran another analysis code this morning (Nov. 10) and discovered that the fireball traveled … a whopping 186 miles through the air,” in keeping with NASA. “The revised calculations put the end point 34 miles above the town of Lutts, in southern Tennessee.”

It was “a rare meteor for those fortunate enough to see it,” NASA officers say.

An overcast sky within the area blocked the view for many individuals, and likewise foiled makes an attempt to estimate the dimensions of the rock, officers say.

Scientists imagine it was “a small fragment of an asteroid burning up.”

NASA says an uptick in meteor sightings is anticipated yearly between September and November because the planet “passes through a broad stream of debris left by Comet Encke.” The particles travels as quick as 65,000 mph because it “burns up” within the environment.

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