Minivan sized Meteor blows up over California, more to come?

This is a rare photo of the minivan sized meteor that exploded over the California and Nevada border.

An explosion on the California-Nevada border early on Sunday, April 22 has been confirmed to be a minivan sized meteor. According to Bill Cooke, director of NASA’s Meteroid Enviroment Office, the meteor weighed around 154,300 lbs or over 75 tons. It was soaring through the sky at 34,000 mph and generating energy equivalent to an explosion of 3.8kilotons of TNT or a 5-kiloton explosion. “Elizabeth Silber at Western University has searched for infrasound signals from the explosion,” Cooke told SpaceWeather.com. “Infrasound is very low frequency sound which can travel great distances. There were strong signals at two stations, enabling a triangulation of the energy source at 37.6N, 120.5W.”

The meteor blew up several hundred miles east of San Francisco and was reported to have let off a sonic boom, shaking houses around the Sierra Nevada mountain range from Central California to Reno, Nevada. “The fact that a sonic boom was heard means that the meteor penetrated very low in the atmosphere, which means it had a speed of less than 15 kilometers per second (about 34,000 mph)” Cooke told SpaceWeather.com.

While the meteor was in the Earth’s atmosphere, the pictures or videos that have been taken of this rare moment, you see a white looking ‘glow’ around it. The explanation of that ‘glow’ is that the meteor is moving so fast through the air that it’s turning the air white.

This meteor has been estimated to be one of the largest to strike the Earth’s atmosphere in recent years.
The meteor is a primitive kind of rock that dates back to 4 to 5 billion years ago.

Peter Jenniskens of NASA’s Ames Research Center quotes,“Our goal is to determine the orbit of the meteor and to understand how it fell apart when entering the Earth’s atmosphere.”

People near where the meteor was seen are starting to look for little pieces of the meteor that broke off during its flight. The meteorites landed not far from Sutter’s Mill in El Dorado County, CA the same place where gold was discovered in the 19th century, starting up the Gold Rush. Jenniskens thinks of finding the meteorites is like the Gold Rush, “I think John A. Sutter must have felt the same way when he found the first gold nugget back in January of 1848.”
“I think this is a reminder that space is not an empty place, it’s full history, and all kind of left over’s from when the Earth and all the other planets formed. There still flying around, and there’s no doubt that they won’t come down.” Corey Powell, Editor in Chief Discover Magazine.

-Eva Driscol
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