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American Morning

Meteor Shower Fascinates Residents Along East Coast

Aired July 24, 2001 - 10:10   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BRIAN NELSON, CNN ANCHOR: Did you see it? That's what people on the eastern seaboard are asking this morning. It was a streak of light flashing across the sky and ending in a bright flash around 6:00 p.m. yesterday. Folks from Virginia to New York reported seeing and then hearing what now appears to be a meteor shower.

Joining us now to discuss the phenomenon is Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington. Mr. Chester, thanks for being with us.

GEOFF CHESTER, U.S. NAVAL OBSERVATORY: Good morning, Brian.

NELSON: What was it?

CHESTER: Well, the simple explanation, it was a rock that fell out of the sky. It wasn't a meteor shower, per se. These are annual events that occur when the Earth blunders into debris that sputtered off from comets. We can predict when those are going to happen. This happened to be a random chunk of rock, a piece of an asteroid, if you will, that happened to be in the same part of the solar system at the same time the Earth was and in this particular case, the Earth won.

NELSON: You think it was just a stray rock because...

CHESTER: Absolutely.

NELSON: This morning, we've been hearing things like it was a bolide ... CHESTER: It was a bolide...

NELSON: ... and it was a fireball and it's a meteor? We're getting confused.

CHESTER: Those are all sort interchangeable terms. A bolide or a fireball are both ways of describes a very bright meteor. Bright meteors occur pretty much on a daily basis over some part of the Earth. Most of the Earth is ocean, a lot of it is unpopulated.

This particular one is unusual because it happened to occur over one of the most populated sections of the United States on a beautiful, clear day, at a time when everybody was driving home from work. So, it's kind of natural.

NELSON: Let me interrupt you here and ask you a couple of questions. What accounts for the explosion-like effect? Is this the same thing as when an old spacecraft hits the atmosphere? My understanding, this happened where this object was well into the atmosphere, so it wasn't entering. So, was it the same effect?

CHESTER: OK, it's all tied into the same basic idea. The visible part, the part that sheds a lot of light, that lit up the sky, that everybody saw; that occurs at a very high altitude in the Earth's atmosphere. That's 70 to 100 miles up in the sky. After it has gone through that luminous phase, it is basically a falling rock. You don't see it.

But it is traveling faster than the speed of sound.

NELSON: So, what accounts for the explosion"

CHESTER: At the point where it goes below the speed of sound, you get sonic booms. You folks at CNN cover the landings of the space shuttle all the time, and every time the space shuttle comes in you get bam-bam, a double sonic boom as the shuttle goes below the speed of sound. This is the same thing.

NELSON: But Mr. Chester, why did the sonic boom occur at the same moment that we saw the flash of light?

CHESTER: Well, I haven't heard all the reports from it yet. It would have happened very shortly afterwards because this thing was moving very, very fast. This goes a lot faster than the space shuttle does. It was probably moving at speed anywhere from 20 to 40 miles per second. That's a little bit faster than the way the shuttle goes.

NELSON: Let me ask you something. If we conducted a search as the Washington police are now doing for Chandra Levy in some field, would we find anything?

CHESTER: It's very possible that there are fragments to this. I've heard scattered reports that there may be pieces that landed in Pennsylvania, another report that I've heard from a small town up near the Finger Lakes of New York. It's very common for these objects to enter the atmosphere, and as they do so, the aerodynamic stresses on them break them apart into smaller rocks and those can scatter over a fairly large area. We had a bright fireball...

NELSON: By now, maybe they've cooled off.

CHESTER: You know, that's another interesting thing, too, is that if you were to touch one right after it fell, it would be cold, because space is very cold and they don't spend that much time in the heat of the atmosphere.

NELSON: OK, Mr. Chester, thank you for being with us this morning. Your insights are much appreciated.

CHESTER: Thanks for having me.

NELSON: Geoff Chester from the U.S. Naval Observatory.

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