[meteorite-list] Meteor Flies Across Texas Sky

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:26:54 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <200902180026.QAA01924_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.kvue.com/news/green/stories/021609kvue-space_rock-mw.228359b7.html

Meteor flies across Texas sky
By SHELTON GREEN
KVUE News
February 16, 2009

It's a bird, it's a plane, no, it was actually a meteor hurling toward
Earth which caused so many 9-1-1 calls to the Williamson County
Sheriff's Department that deputies sent out a helicopter to look for
debris from a crashed plane.

Sunday morning around 11, dozens of central Texans saw a bright object
speeding towards the ground in the north part of the sky.

The first official reports said the ball of fire may have been debris
from two satellites which could have collided high above earth.

On Monday, the F.A.A. reported that the flaming object was no space
debris, instead it was a meteor which a north Texas scientist now
believes may have been the size of a pick-up hurling itself toward Earth
at 15,000 miles an hour.

"It was like a giant ball of fire that looks like it was falling from
the sky and it just disappeared into the horizon," said one caller to
Austin's 9-1-1.

Ann Molineux, one of the curators at the Texas Memorial Museum
specializing in meteorites told KVUE that Texas has two or three meteors
hitting the ground becoming meteorites every 10 years, and those are the
ones that we can see.

"It contains a lot of information about the very early formation of this
particular planet and also our own solar system," says Molineux.

The vast majority of meteors heading toward earth are believed to come
from the Asteroid Belt located between Mars and Saturn.

Some are fragments of infant planets.

Most of the space rocks burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.

The few reaching the ground are known to contain a wide variety of
different elements, everything from iron to nickle, gems, gasses, even
water.

"Meteorites help us learn, they put us in our place in a way and make us
realize that there's a lot that we don't yet know about how our own
solar system was formed and about how the whole universe was formed,"
Molineux says.

A scientist at the University of North Texas told the Associated Press
that if Sunday's meteor did survive once it hit the ground that it went
from the size of a pick-up to the size of a fist.
Received on Tue 17 Feb 2009 07:26:54 PM PST