How Amateur Videos Will Help Astronomers Reconstruct Meteorite's Life History
Fireball in the sky! ScreenshotAstronomers can retrace space rocks' paths to find their birthplace. Last April, a minivan-sized chunk of leftover primordial planet punched through Earth's atmosphere at 64,000 miles per hour. The minivan-sized meteor weighed just under 100,000 pounds before it exploded high above northern California, disintegrating into rock dust and smaller meteoroids that fell onto suburban driveways in El Dorado County. Video cameras and weather radar captured the space rock, later nicknamed the Sutter's Mill meteorite, as it streaked through the sky. Thanks to these detailed observations, scientists were able to reconstruct its entire life history. They hope to do the same thing for the massive meteor that exploded above Russia on Friday. Russian drivers, skywatchers and pedestrians captured voluminous video tracking Friday's meteoroid, so scientists will have plenty of evidence to reconstruct its trajectory, astronomers said. "We would need observations from at least three different locations, and...