Numerous people called in to news stations and police last night, around 9:20 pm, when a bright fireball lit up the skies over Tucson. It may have been a chunk of cosmic debris, or it could have been a satellite or pieces of space junk burning up in the atmosphere.

Large fireballs are called bolides, and typically there might be one or two reported annually, worldwide, if that. Remarkably, this is the fourth large fireball to have been witnessed over North America during the past seven months. Two of those sightings Buzzard Coulee (Saskatchewan, November 20, 2008) and the West, Texas fireball (February 15, 2009) produced numerous meteorite fragments. I visited both sites with my recovery team and we found a number of excellent, freshly-fallen meteorites. The fireball seen last night over Tucson may also have scattered fragments of a similar extraterrestrial body over the desert of southern Arizona. Or they might be satellite parts, or they might have burned up completely. We don’t know yet.

Nighttime fireballs often produce a remarkable illusion: the light generated is so bright that the fireball often appears much closer than it really is. The West, Texas fireball that we investigated earlier this year was captured on camera from approximately 120 miles away. The difficult part is figuring out where the meteorites (if any) landed. Eyewitnesses close to the point of impact frequently report hearing loud sonic booms and rattling windows. One eyewitness to the famous Park Forest meteorite shower (Cook County, Illinois, March 26, 2003) told me he thought hailstones were hitting the roof of his house. In fact, they were small stone meteorites.

If you saw the event last night, and heard sonic booms, rumblings, “whizzing” sounds, or impacts on the roof of your house, very shortly after the fireball, please report details of the Tucson fireball.

Meteorites that have only been on the earth for a short time are of great value to researchers: the sooner fragments are collected, the less they have been contaminated by our atmosphere. Once meteorites have been exposed to rain, they often begin to rust and decompose. With the Monsoon season rapidly approaching, there may be only a short window during which uncontaminated pieces can be recovered.

This morning I was invited by KOLD News 13 meteorologist Erin Jordan to appear on the Live at Noon News to talk about the fireball. Our segment aired at noon and will likely repeat at 5 pm. The KOLD team were most enthusiastic and hospitable and enjoyed our show-and-tell traveling meteorite display.

This afternoon I had the pleasure of speaking with an eyewitness to last night’s sky-illuminating event. He was in his living room, watching TV, around 9:20 pm when he saw an extremely bright flash through the windows. A security conscious individual, the gentleman keeps a surveillance camera running 24/7 and—incredibly enough—that camera was aimed in just the right direction to capture the fireball. What are the chances of that?

If you have information about the fireball, please share it. If it was a meteorite, we hope it might be possible to recover fragments for study. Events like this don’t happen every day, and it’s especially exciting that Tucson is the site of the latest fireball. After all, we do call Tucson “The Meteorite Capital of the World.”

Find out more on the KOLD.com news site and Erin Jordan’s First Alert Blog and watch our KOLD Tucson fireball segment online.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Meteorite Science. Tags for this post: Arizona meteor, Erin Jordan, Fireball sighting, KOLD News Channel 13 Tucson, meteorite, meteorites, meteors, Suzanne Morrison, Tucson fireball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.