[meteorite-list] Fireball Wows New Zealanders

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:06:56 2004
Message-ID: <200210070008.RAA23943_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://asia.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/10/02/newzealand.fireball.ap/index.html

Sky fireball wows New Zealanders
Associated Press
October 3, 2002

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- A fireball that streaked through the skies
of New Zealand, triggering hundreds of calls to police likely was debris
from a satellite burning up in the atmosphere, astronomers said Wednesday.

Police stations along North Island's east coast said callers reported the
fireball spewing a trail of brightly colored sparks as it rocketed eastward.

Richard Hall, an astronomer at Wellington's Carter Observatory, said the
object likely was a chunk of space debris, perhaps from a satellite.

One caller told him it shone "like the headlamp of a large aircraft and then
it brightened till it was about 100 times brighter than (the planet) Venus,"
Hall said. "Then (he) talked about lumps coming off of it and all different
colors appearing."

Its low trajectory across the sky was similar to the track of a decaying
satellite, and the fact that it threw off multicolored light also suggested
space junk.

"Because ... an old satellite is made up of many components, as it burns it
gives off lots of different colors," Hall said.

Hall said the object probably crashed into the Pacific Ocean east of New Zealand.

Space agencies often guide decaying space material like decommissioned
satellites to a "space junkyard" in the South Pacific, but they rarely passed
over New Zealand.

In March last year, white hot fragments of the Mir space station illuminated the
skies above Fiji before splashing down in the Pacific.
Received on Sun 06 Oct 2002 08:08:18 PM PDT