Fireball not Russian rocket debris, space center says

The “Big Bang” on Sunday night now appears to have been caused by a meteor, not a leftover bit of Russian rocket.

The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California issued a statement Tuesday morning saying it tracks more than 19,000 manmade objects in space.

“The ‘bright light’ that was reported on the East Coast on Sunday, 29 March at 9:45 p.m. EST was not a result of any trackable manmade object on reentry,” it said.

A spokesman for the center said Tuesday morning: “If it was a meteorite, we don’t track that kind of thing.”

The bright fireball, which was followed one or two minutes later by an enormous booming sound, was seen by many people between Maryland and North Carolina. Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., said on Monday he was nearly positive that it was caused by the booster of a Russian rocket falling back to Earth.

That no longer seems to be the case.

The Baltimore Sun reported that a satellite tracker determined the rocket booster did cross over Hampton Roads, but at too high an altitude to have burned. The Joint Space Operations Center could not immediately confirm reports that the rocket fell into the ocean near Taiwan about two hours after the fireball was seen.

Sky and Telescope magazine’s senior editor Alan MacRobert urged witnesses to record their observations of the fireball at www.amsmeteors.org/fireball/report.html or at www.spaceweather.com.

MacRobert said that the suspected meteor’s path can be reconstructed if enough eyewitness reports give information about the object in relation to the stars or even trees and buildings. Such reports can also help predict where meteorites might have fallen.

Bright meteors are not uncommon, but since most fall over the ocean or unpopulated regions, they are seldom witnessed.

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.

Pilot writers Diane Tennant, Patrick Wilson and Carl Fincke contributed to this report.