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Meteor, or Russian Rocket?
Posted by Bigfoot on March 30th, 2009
Last night, residents of eastern Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina were treated to a light show, along with a loud booming noise, which were said to be from a meteor.
A mysterious flash of light and loud boom occurred over the skies of Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Va., on Sunday night, but just what caused the phenomenon is still unknown.
Calls from local residents to 911 began coming in at around 9:45 p.m. EDT, with some people reporting their doors and windows rattled when the boom went off, according to reports from WVEC-TV.
Similar reports in the past often have turned out to involve meteors, which can explode in the atmosphere to create a loud noise and bright flash of light that streaks across the sky. However, often times the source of events like this are not determined.
According to the Richmond Times Dispatch,
The fireball in the sky last night could have been caused by a Russian booster rocket falling toward earth, a U.S. Naval Observatory official says.
“It’s perfectly consistent with what everybody’s been describing,” said Geoff Chester, a public relations officer with the observatory.
Chester has also been cited by the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory, which provides a wide range of astronomical data, said Monday the brilliant, streaking lights were either space junk or a super bright meteor known as a bolide.
If the object was from Russia, rather than from outer space, it was the second stage of a Soyuz rocket taking cosmonauts up to the international space station, along with one American passenger.
The Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off Thursday from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch a new crew and American billionaire Charles Simonyi – the world’s first two-time space tourist – to the International Space Station. The spaceflyers arrived at the space station on Saturday.
Now there’s a trip I’d love to be able to afford.
March 30th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Isn’t this some kind of environmental hazard that Obama will be speaking about tomorrow? I seem to recall that it will take $12 billion to research.
March 31st, 2009 at 8:01 am
It could have been both the meteor AND the rocket.
Actually this stuff kind of freaks me out a bit. LOL UFO’s in general. Or, UFBUO- UF blowing up O.