Near-Earth objects and close calls

Here's an example of a probable fake video. The lighting looks all wrong, this would have been a big event seen by many people but no reports on IMO database.

You can tell that it is fake
due to that the sky has been "masked" (with a darker sky), in order to get the meteor into the video. The artifacts along the horizon - like a thin, diffuse brighter line - reveals pretty clearly that the video has been tampered with.
 
Meteor passed over NYC, Statue of Liberty Tuesday: NASA
Users on social media across New York and New Jersey reported feeling a shaking or hearing a loud noise just after 11 a.m. It's unclear if the meteor was responsible for what residents felt.

A number of tri-state area residents reported feeling a shaking or hearing a loud boom Tuesday morning leading to quite the mystery.

NASA is estimating a meteor passed through the area between 10 a.m. and noon and would account for people saying they saw a fireball in the sky. NASA said simultaneous military activity in the area may account the shaking or boom residents felt.

The reports came on social media shortly after 11 a.m. with some users saying they felt shaking like an earthquake and another saying they thought they heard thunder. Some of the reports included parts of northern New Jersey, Brooklyn and Queens.

The American Meteor Society website does show around 20 fireball reports across New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, with additional reports in Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland, during that timeframe.

NASA said as a result of the reports, it was able to come up with a "very crude" determination of the trajectory of the meteor. The fireball was first sighted over the New York Harbor moving 34,000 miles per hour before it descended at a steep angle, NASA said. The space agency said it estimates the meteor passed over the Statue of Liberty before disintegrated 29 miles above midtown Manhattan.
meteor-trajectory-1.jpg
A "crude" determination of the meteor's track, provided by NASA
New York City's emergency management department said it was aware of the reports and was not aware of any impacts to the city.

No meteorites were produced by this fireball, according to NASA. The USGS website is not showing any earthquakes on its "latest earthquakes" maps, which shows recent earth quakes of a 2.5-magntitude or higher. A USGS spokesperson said it received reports of shaking in northeast New Jersey and Staten Island, but "An examination of the seismic data in the area showed no evidence of an earthquake. The USGS has no direct evidence of the source of the shaking."
 
As Daichi Fujii (藤井大地) said, atmospheric observation conditions were faint, but sonics were observed during this daytime event in Japan.

This is more than likely related to the current Perseid meteor shower and the comet dust (and or debris) from Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle (an ancient wanderer of the heavens).

A fireball appeared today during the day! I filmed it moving across the southeastern sky from my home in Hiratsuka at 12:18:11 on August 4, 2024. The meteor is hard to see in the whitish sky, so I've significantly increased the contrast of the footage. In some areas of Chiba Prefecture, an explosion was reported a few minutes later, which may have been a meteorite.
L-2
I live in Chosei Village, Chiba, and I was outside when I heard an explosion and felt vibrations, so I thought Mount Fuji had erupted

This is a video taken by the Asahi Shimbun Space Department's camera installed in Tsukiji, Tokyo. @Hokulani_mauna found it.

Tsukiji Live (8/4 normal speed)What? What? What?! I saw Fujii ( @dfuji1's post and rewound it...There it was! A meteor in the daytime! Top left Rainbow Bridge, Tsukiji Market Ruins, Shooting Stars and Night Sky Live Meteor shower and night sky LIVE from Tsukiji ... https:/youtube.com/live/vz1utezaA8c?si=J6-M7IZgqT45EPrB @YouTube

 
Two fireballs entered the NASA list on June 18. One had a total impact energy of 1.2kt of TNT which is about 9 times more than the one over Portugal earlier in the month, (0.13kt of TNT) and the largest yet, this year.
One entry was over the Atlantic, the other over the Pacific Ocean.
View attachment 97611
Since then, there has been the following additions to the list, but including the above two:
2024-08-11 204336.png
The one over Brazil on July 13, the day of the attempt on Donald Trump, has this corresponding article on SOTT:
Meteor fireball over Brazil on July 13 - [Update: Calculated total impact energy 1.5 kt TNT]
From what I could find, the other new additions were over the oceans which explains a lack of publicly available footage.

The fireball over NYC on July 16, Meteor fireball over Connecticut and other states on July 16, did not enter the list, but it was on the 30th anniversary of the contact with the Cs which happens to also be 30 years since the first fragments of Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted Jupiter:
 

BREAKING! Small asteroid to hit Earth’s atmosphere TODAY​

Small asteroid to hit us
Heads up! A small asteroid – approximately 1 meter (3 feet) wide – will strike Earth’s atmosphere today (September 4, 2024) over the Philippines around 16:46 UTC according to the European Space Agency. That’s after midnight tonight in the Philippines. And it’s 11:46 a.m. CDT on Wednesday, September 4, for us in North America. The asteroid is expected to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere above the area of Luzon. It’s expected to create a bright fireball for anyone watching! If you’re in the Philippines, go outside and look around 12:46 a.m. PHST on Thursday, September 5.

This is only the 9th time we’ve spotted an asteroid before it’s struck us. And it was Jacqueline Fazekas at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona who discovered this asteroid just hours ago. Jacqueline discovered the object about eight hours before its predicted impact. The asteroid has been given the provisional designation CAQTDL2.

Map of Philippines with stretched out ovals over the northern region showing possible scatter plots of small asteroid.


A small asteroid, just discovered hours ago, will strike Earth’s atmosphere above the Philippines around 16:46 UTC on September 4. Image via ESA.

 
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NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick
© NASA/Matthew Dominick. NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick shared a new timelapse of a bright green fireball on Sept. 2 as the International Space Station passed over Cairo, Egypt.

The meteor explosion, called a bolide, was exceptionally bright.

A new video from an astronaut's vantage point in space captures a bright green burst over Earth as a meteor exploded in the night sky.

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, commander of the SpaceX Crew-8 mission, shared a new time-lapse of photos taken from the International Space Station as it passed over Cairo, Egypt. While aiming to photograph the Milky Way's Core, Dominick ended up capturing a bright green fireball that exploded on Monday (Sept. 2) at 8:12 p.m. EDT (2012 GMT).

The outburst seen in the time-lapse was created by a meteor that entered Earth's atmosphere and burned up. Dominick shared the new view in a post on X (formally Twitter) on Sept. 3.
"I showed this to a couple of friends yesterday to see what they thought," Dominick wrote in his post. "They both thought it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere — a rather bright one called a bolide."

Dominick shared two versions of the timelapse. In his initial post, the timelapse was slowed down to one frame per second, offering a more detailed view of the fleeting meteor as it streaked across the sky and then exploded. In the comments, Dominick shared a faster version, in which the meteor appears as only a very brief flash in the top right of the frame.

Given the exceptional brightness of the meteor, it is considered a bolide, which is a large meteor that explodes in Earth's atmosphere with enough force to create a sonic boom. This type of meteor can last several seconds, or even minutes, and create a bright glow across the sky that outshines the stars and moon.

"I think it is interesting to compare the size of the bolide blast to other objects in view like the Mediterranean, Cairo, or lightning strikes," Dominick commented.
 
A recent development concerning the Dart Mission (about the DART Impact) is that the debris field will pass over Mars and Earth in the near future.

06/09/2024
In 2022 NASA’s DART spacecraft made history, and changed the Solar System forever, by impacting the Dimorphos asteroid and measurably shifting its orbit around the larger Didymos asteroid. In the process a plume of debris was thrown out into space.

The latest modelling, available on the preprint server arXiv and accepted for publication in the September volume of The Planetary Science Journal, shows how small meteoroids from that debris could eventually reach both Mars and Earth – potentially in an observable (although quite safe) manner.

On 26 September 2022, NASA’s approximately half-tonne Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) spacecraft impacted the 151 m diameter Dimorphos asteroid at an approximate speed of 6.1 km/s, shortening its orbit around Didymos by more than half an hour during the first part of an international planetary defence collaboration.

ESA’s Hera spacecraft will be launched this October to reach Dimorphos and perform a close-up ‘crash scene investigation’, gathering data on the asteroid’s mass, structure and make-up to turn this kinetic impact method of planetary defence into a well understood and repeatable technique.

“The DART impact offers a rare opportunity to investigate the delivery of ejecta to other celestial bodies, thanks to the fact that we know the impact location and that this impact was observed by the Italian LICIACube deployed from DART as well as by Earth-based observers,” explains co-author and ESA Hera mission scientist Michael Kueppers.

“We simulated the ejecta to match LICIACube observations using three million particles grouped into three size populations – 10 cm, 0.5 cm and 30 μm, or thousandths of a millimetre – moving at speeds of 1 to 1000 m/s or a faster rate of up to 2 km/s."

Screenshot 2024-09-11 at 07-10-37 ESA - Debris from DART impact could reach Earth.png

Study lead author Eloy Peña-Asensio, of the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology, Politecnico di Milano, explains: “We identified ejecta orbits compatible with the delivery of meteor-producing particles to both Mars and Earth. Our results indicate the possibility of ejecta reaching the gravitational field of Mars in 13 years for launch velocities around 450 m/s, while faster ejecta launched at 770 m/s could reach its vicinity in just seven years. Particles moving above 1.5 km/s could reach the Earth-Moon system in a similar timescale.”

Eloy adds: “In the coming decades, meteor observation campaigns will be crucial in determining whether fragments of Dimorphos, resulting from the DART impact, will reach our planet."

"If this happens, we will witness the first human-made meteor shower.”

Josep M. Trigo-Rodríguez from the Spanish Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC/IEEC) supported the study of the dynamic evolution of the debris generated by DART's impact within the framework of his contribution to the DART mission, adding: "We were amazed to discover that it is possible for some centimetre-sized particles to reach the Earth-Moon system and produce a new meteor shower."

Whether the meteoroids head towards Earth or Mars would depend on their position in DART’s cone-shaped impact plume – material on its north side is more likely to head Mars-ward while southwestern material is more likely to reach Earth.

The very largest of these meteoroids would only be the size of a softball. They would be certain to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, although they might make it through the thinner Martian atmosphere.

In any case, it appears that only smaller particles are likely to reach Earth, as these are the ones that would have been launched at the highest velocities. We cannot yet determine if these particles will be large enough to produce observable meteors, so continued monitoring of the night sky will be essential.

Michael adds: “Our accurate knowledge of the impact site and impactor properties in terms of size, mass and velocity plus the observations of the ejecta are what allowed us to estimate the long-term fate of the material leaving the Didymos system."

"Combined with Hera's upcoming investigation of the target asteroid, we will end up in the unique situation of having full information about the impactor, the target asteroid, and the material ejected from it.”

There are more than 1000 known meteoroid streams criss-crossing Earth’s orbit, linked to famous annual meteor showers such as the recent Perseids and the autumn Taurids.

Astronomers have become skilled at tracing back the origin of meteors to particular meteoroid streams or parent comet or asteroid bodies. This study involves the same kind of calculation but in reverse, to foretell the likely characteristics and timings of meteors linked to DART’s impact.

Michael explains: “The exciting thing is the prospect of identifying and observing meteors linked to the DART impact, either on Earth or perhaps one day even on Mars, with their brightness and colour revealing details of their makeup."

"Our study includes the distinct orbital characteristics that would distinguish these meteors from comparable ones. The potential meteors created by DART would be slow-moving, primarily visible from the southern hemisphere, and most likely to occur in May.”

Hera was recently transported from Europe to Cape Canaveral in the USA for launch by SpaceX Falcon 9 in October. It is due to reach the Dimorphos asteroid and begin its investigation in late 2026.

 

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