NASA and the SETI Institute are asking the public to check their video security camera footage around 7:44 p.m. PDT Wednesday night, in the hope it recorded the meteor that illuminated the sky over the Bay Area and created sonic booms. That video may help researchers study how the meteor broke during descent.
The fireball was filmed by two stations of NASA’s Cameras for All-sky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) project, located in Sunnyvale and at the San Mateo College Observatory. The calculated trajectory shows that meteorites may have fallen just north of San Pablo Bay, along a band stretching east of San Rafael towards Sonoma and Napa, a mostly agricultural area.
Preliminary trajectory calculated by Peter Jenniskens from Sunnyvale and San Mateo College Observatory CAMS video data.
Only one of the three regular CAMS stations caught the fireball, the NASA/CAMS Sunnyvale station (Jim Albers). For the two other sites, the fireball was just outside the field of view. Fortunately, thanks to the single-CAMS program run by Dave Sammuels), there was a single-CAMS camera setup at the San Mateo College observatory (Dean Drumheller). That one camera provides the second view for triangulation. The video is too bloomed for the regular software processing to work, but the average frames show a nice streak, which was used to combine with the early trajectory part from Sunnyvale, using AstroRecord and FIRBAL software.
The preliminary trajectory is plotted in the image above. The potential fall area is over land. The asteroid entered at a speed of 14 km/s, typical but on the slow side of other meteorite falls for which orbits were determined. Good chance a relatively large fraction of this rock survived. The fall area is in the North Bay. The orbit in space is also rather typical: perihelion distance close to Earth’s orbit (q = 0.987 AU) and a low-inclination orbit (about 5 degrees). Much more accurate results will follow from a comprehensive study of the video records. Now, we hope that someone recovers a meteorite on the ground…
Image by San Mateo College student Paola-Castillo, using her cell phone while stuck in traffic.
Image by Rachel Fritz and Rick Nolthenius of Cabrillo College, Aptos
Image by Wes Jones, Belmont
2012, October 17 – At 7:44:29 pm PDT this evening, a bright fireball was seen in the San Francisco Bay Area. The image above was taken by Wes Jones from Belmont. We are checking our CAMS camera results to see if we have a track. Biggest question at the moment is whether this ended over land or ocean. [Lick Observatory security camera footage]
“This was a slow moving fireball, which greatly increases the chances that a significant fraction of it and somewhat larger pieces survived,” said meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens, of the SETI Institute. A map of the fireball’s trajectory and the general area where the search would commence can be found at the CAMS website. To report video and photographic records, please visit: http://cams.seti.org
