A bright fireball spotted streaking across the sky over southeastern Texas on Saturday has been confirmed as a meteor, NASA announced, releasing a new strewn-field map showing where fragments may have landed after the object broke apart.
The event, which occurred at 4:40 p.m. local time, was widely reported, with eyewitnesses spotting it from as far away as Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, and Rockport. The event was also caught on video. Multiple weather radars captured signatures of falling meteorites for about eight minutes after the meteor fragmented.
According to NASA, the meteoroid weighed about a ton and measured roughly three feet across before entering the atmosphere.
It first became visible at 49 miles above Stagecoach, northwest of Houston, then moved southeast at 35,000 mph before breaking apart 29 miles above Bammel, just west of Cypress Station.
“The resulting fireball released an amount of energy equivalent to 26 tons of TNT into the atmosphere,” NASA stated in its entry. “Most of the mass of an object like this is reduced to atoms and fine droplets during the fireball, and only a few percent of the total mass survives to reach the ground, scattered across a range of meteorite sizes.”
The agency’s map illustrates a simplified estimate of where meteorites might have landed, covering parts of Montgomery County and north Harris County. Dark red areas indicate possible locations for 10-kilogram meteorites, if produced, followed by red for 1-kilogram pieces, dark orange for 100-gram fragments, light orange for 10-gram pieces, and yellow for 1-gram specks. Doppler weather radar from KHGX and TIAH showed the meteorites dropping between Willowbrook and Northgate Crossing.
NASA advised the public to respect private property and avoid trespassing while searching for any meteorites.
One Houston-area resident reported that a fragment crashed through her home’s roof near Cypress Station. Sherrie James said she was combing her hair in the bathroom when she heard a loud boom and thud from her daughter’s room.
“I just went in and looked, and I saw the hole, and I saw the dent in the floor,” James said, per NBC News. “And I’m like: What is this? And I called my grandson, and I said: Look at that. I said, ‘Is that a meteor?’ That’s the first thing came to my mind, because it was all black.”
She described the suspected meteorite as about the size of a baseball but heavier, calling it “a big, black rock.” No one in the household was injured.
“It just looked like a rock, and ain’t no rocks got no business falling out of the sky,” James said.
The American Meteor Society received more than 170 reports of the event across south-central and southeastern Texas, including Houston, Katy, College Station, San Antonio, and Austin.
The pressure wave from the fragmentation also produced sonic booms heard by some residents in the area.