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Streaking lights, explosions reported all along US East coast

Tuesday, March 31 2009 @ 02:01 AM CDT

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Rocket trash? Explosion's cause may never be known

We might never know what streaked across the Eastern Seaboard sky Sunday night, producing a window-rattling boom, but a U.S. Naval Observatory official says it probably was a piece of Russian space junk or a meteor.

Geoff Chester, the public affairs officer for the observatory, said the projected re-entry path of the booster for a Soyuz rocket matched up with the timing and location of eyewitness reports from Hampton Roads.

"The final orbit for this thing took it smack over you guys when all the fun was happening," Chester said.

People from Maryland to North Carolina reported seeing a fiery streak of light sometime between 9:40 and 9:50 p.m. Sunday, followed by one or more explosion-like sounds.

Chester said the fireball could have been a second-stage booster from a Soyuz rocket that lifted off on Thursday from Kazakhstan, taking a crew and a billionaire tourist to the international space station. He said any remains of the booster probably landed in the water more than a hundred miles off Cape Hatteras.

The other possible explanation for the event was a meteor, Chester said.

"I can't say definitively which it was, but it was one or the other," he said. "I have a hard time believing that a natural occurrence would happen around the same time that this (the rocket re-entry) was happening."

Most astronomy experts say the loud noise heard across Hampton Roads was probably a sonic boom created by the object.

S. Kent Blackwell, an amateur astronomer, was sky-watching in Pungo when the explosion occurred. He said he saw a flash of light "two or three times brighter than the full moon, then it turned orange with a white core and disappeared."

One to two minutes later, a loud noise shook houses in Norfolk and Virginia Beach and was heard as far away as the Eastern Shore.

"It was a very ominous, low-frequency rumble," said Robert Hitt, director of the Chesapeake planetarium, who lives in the Acredale section of Virginia Beach. "The sound was quite different from what you hear from thunder."

No meteor showers are taking place at the moment. The next one is predicted for April 21-22.

The Air Force command that tracks space debris in low-Earth orbit first predicted that the Russian booster might enter the atmosphere near Taiwan, Chester said. However, the prediction was refined over time, and Chester said it appears that the booster's path took it within sight of Hampton Roads.

"This was the second stage, which is a pretty sizable chunk of hardware," Chester said. "Something like that coming down over a populated area on a clear night, somebody's going to notice it."

Chester said the fireball was seen in Roanoke, and startled people so much near Washington that a fire truck was called out. The object was probably hundreds of miles away, he said.

The second-stage booster is about 20 to 25 feet long, with a diameter of 6 to 8 feet, he said. If the fireball was caused by a meteor, it could have been the size of a desk or a large suitcase, he added.

"The descriptions are consistent with both phenomena," he said. "It was either a naturally occurring fireball or it was this potentially re-entering piece of space debris. The devil is in the details."

If it was a meteor, the noise could mean that it was close enough to the ground for meteorites to land, said Alan MacRobert, senior editor of Sky & Telescope magazine. He encouraged eyewitnesses to report what they saw at www.amsmeteors.org/fireball/report.html, or at www.spaceweather.com.

Scientists can predict where to look for meteorites on the ground "if enough people can accurately reconstruct the flight path that they saw in the sky, or if they can simply say, 'It went behind that tree,' " he said.

The American Meteor Society seeks information about brightness, length across the sky, color, how long it lasted, direction of travel and position in the sky as compared with constellations or even trees and buildings. Although the sight was unusual for Hampton Roads, the society reports that thousands of fireballs occur in Earth's atmosphere each day, many during daylight when they cannot be easily seen, others in remote locations.



Pilot writers Diane Tennant, Patrick Wilson and Carl Fincke contributed to this report.
http://hamptonroads.com

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