Meteor passes over New York City
18-07-2024 12:07 PM
Ammon News - The path of the meteor that passed over New York City Tuesday morning has been updated by NASA.
The space agency now says the meteor originated over New York City and moved west into New Jersey. It also upgraded the speed of the meteor to 38,000 miles per hour.
The American Meteor Society received a number of reports of people seeing a fireball in the sky around 11:17 a.m. Tuesday. In addition, a number of residents across New York and New Jersey said they felt shaking like an earthquake and another saying they thought they heard thunder. Some of the reports included parts of northern New Jersey, Brooklyn and Queens.
"You have to have one bright enough and it has to be right over New York to get all that attention. Daytime fireballs are fairly rare and New Yorkers got to see one this morning," said Bill Cooke from NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.
The American Meteor Society website does show around 20 fireball reports across New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, with additional reports in Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland, during that timeframe.
NASA originally said as a result of the reports, it was able to come up with a "very crude" determination of the trajectory of the meteor. The fireball was first sighted over the New York Harbor moving 34,000 miles per hour before it descended at a steep angle, NASA said. The space agency said it estimates the meteor passed over the Statue of Liberty before disintegrated 29 miles above midtown Manhattan. The agency updated that track later on Tuesday after receiving more eyewitness accounts.
NASA said it does not track meteors this small is size far from the earth "so the only time we know about them is when they hit the atmosphere and generate a meteor or a fireball."
It said it keeps track of asteroids that pose a danger to people on Earth, but the rocks producing this fireball "are only about a foot in diameter, incapable of surviving all the way to the ground."
Judah Bergman said he saw something out the window of his Lakewood, New Jersey office.
"It just caught my eye as a fireball streaming through the sky," Bergman said.
Some eyewitnesses said they thought they saw it chart a course directly over the State of Liberty, but NASA said with only 15 documented witnesses it's path is not 100 percent certain.
"We lack camera data and satellite data for this event," Cooke said. "I'm just going off what the eyewitnesses said. I can tell you it was definitely a meteor."
New York City's emergency management department said it was aware of the reports and was not aware of any impacts to the city.
NBC New York called the Department of Defense to see if any military aircraft or exercises could have been responsible. A press officer at the Pentagon said they were not tracking anything that could be responsible for the reports. North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) tells NBC New York it too was not tracking any activity that could account for what residents felt.
NASA said "There are reports of military in the vicinity around the time of the fireball, which could explain the shaking and sounds reported to the media."
The FAA said only a military aircraft could be responsible for any sonic booms and referred NBC New York to the military.
No meteorites were produced by this fireball and it posed no threat to people on Earth, according to NASA.
NBC