Most of us were asleep at 4:50am on Tuesday morning when a 500-pound space rock hurtled into Earth’s atmosphere. It was on its way to Pittsburgh.
Fortunately the meteor’s aim was off a bit — just enough to miss all the populated areas and disintegrate east of Kittanning.
Considering its early morning arrival we wouldn’t know about it if a few people hadn’t been awake. Eyewitnesses reported seeing and hearing it on the American Meteor Society (AMS) website and NASA’s camera at Allegheny Observatory recorded its arrival in the video above.
Using eyewitness reports AMS generated a map of its trajectory. Click and scroll down to see what it was aiming for. Yikes!
We were lucky. In an uncanny space-time coincidence a very big meteor whooshed over Russia two years and two days before the Kittanning event. It weighed 10,000 tons(*) and injured over 1,000 people. February 15, 2013 in Russia. February 17, 2015 in Pittsburgh.
…What is it about February?
I wish I had seen it. I was awake but I wasn’t paying attention.
(YouTube video of the February 17 fireball from NASA’s Marshall Center)
(*) that’s 40,000 times heavier than the meteor at Kittanning.
On the evening of October 9, 1992 I was at a high school football game and was one of thousands who witnessed the Peekskill Meteorite fireball pass over Hampton Township Pa. It was a spectacular once in a lifetime event. The meteorite landed in Peekskill New York and hit a 17 year old woman’s car. Her insurance company refused to pay, but she eventually sold the car and meteorite to a museum for $69,000. It was a 12 year old car with a happy ending.