"The network is basically a decentralized scientific instrument made up of amateur astronomers and citizen scientists around the planet, each with their own camera systems," said Vida, who founded the initiative. The Global Meteor Network - whose tagline is "No Meteor Unobserved"-is working toward covering the globe with meteor cameras in order to provide the public with real-time alerts, as well as building a picture of the meteoroid environment around Earth. And like a rock skipping off a lake, the meteoroid also briefly enters the atmosphere before exiting again. And while tens of thousands of meteorites have been found on Earth, only about 40 can be traced back to a parent asteroid or asteroidal source.įor a rock to "bounce" off Earth's atmosphere, it has to enter the atmosphere at a fairly shallow angle. No estimate on the size of the Earth-grazer from September 22, but it was likely fairly small. A small percentage of the largest rocks reach the ground as meteorites. The most common effect that these small objects produce when interacting with Earth's atmosphere are meteors-commonly called shooting stars. But every day, hundreds of tons of small interplanetary objects enter Earth's atmosphere. Scientists estimate that Earth-grazing meteoroids only occur just a handful of times per year. This image depicts the two areas where most of the asteroids in the solar system are found: the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the trojans, two groups of asteroids moving ahead of and following Jupiter in its orbit around the sun. Most of them disintegrate, possibly with pieces reaching the ground as meteorites. It entered the atmosphere at 34.1 km/s, reached the lowest altitude of ~91 km and bounced back into space! /5EgRivdcsu- Denis Vida September 22, 2020Īs ESA explains, a meteoroid is typically a fragment of a comet or asteroid that becomes a meteor-a bright light streaking through the sky-when it enters the atmosphere. (1/2) An earthgrazer above N Germany and the Netherlands was observed by 8 #globalmeteornetwork cameras on Sept 22, 03:53:35 UTC. It came in as low as 91 km (56 miles) in altitude-far below any orbiting satellites-before it skipping back into space.ĭennis Vida, a physics postdoc from Western University in Ontario, Canada, who leads the GMN, said they traced the rock to a Jupiter-family orbit, but a search of potential parent bodies found no conclusive matches. The meteoroid, spotted by a camera from the Global Meteor Network, was seen in the skies above Northern Germany and the Netherlands. On September 22, 2020, a small space rock skipped through Earth's atmosphere and bounced back into space.
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