It’s hard to decipher what that bright light you saw in the sky was or, if you know when to look, where that shooting star should be located.
NASA’s All Sky Fireball Network aims to make the process of night sky gazing a lot easier. Using three video cameras located in Tullahoma, Tenn.; Chickamauga, Geor.; and Huntsville, Ala., scientists are tracking the trajectory of fireballs – or meteors brighter than Venus – in order to help spacecraft designers. Bonus: Videos, detailed charts and analytical models from the last three weeks are available to the public so you can track the data for yourself.
“Throughout history, people wondered what meteors were,” head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office Bill Cooke explains. “Aristotle thought they were gases in the atmosphere! It wasn’t until the turn of the twentieth century, in the early 1900s, that people accepted that rocks could fall from the sky.”
The bright trails left by space rocks as they burn up when entering our atmosphere are colloquially known as shooting stars – which aren’t bright twinkling lights that race across the sky as the name would suggest. A similar project to track fireballs called the Prairie Network was set up in the Midwestern U.S. in the 1960s. Scientists photographed the night sky and used brain power to calculate the meteor’s path. The operation was shut down in the mid 1970s, and it wasn’t until now that there’s been a better, cheaper way to find the information, Cooke says.
Each night, three low-light level, black and white video cameras with overlapping fields of view point their lenses up at the sky. The stark contrast makes the dashes of white pop out against the subtle grey background, and the video cameras capture the journey of the space rock as it falls to the ground, hopefully not disintegrated due to harsh forces by the time it touches the Earth.
Oftentimes these meteors are traveling at 150,000 miles per hour about 50 miles above people’s heads, so it’s just a flicker that we might see from the corners of our eyes. The cameras capture everything that occurs in their scope, including some unexpected creatures like a bird that decided to rest on one of the lenses and block the view with its flittering wings.
In the morning, the cameras send all their data to one computer that crunches it instantaneously and plots the trajectory of the fireballs. All Cooke has to do is drink his coffee and check for an email with the information. When someone calls in to ask him what it is they saw the night before, the scientist can give them an answer right away. “I don’t have to look at this video frame by frame,” he explains. “The computers can do it now.” Or, you can check it out for yourself, see what’s hitting our atmosphere and relive the experience if you saw it firsthand.
Cooke is looking to augment the information with 12 more cameras east of the Mississippi; the next one being located in Cartersville, Geor. on March 17. The perfect place for a camera has a clear horizon and few bright lights around – and access to a fast Internet connection.
There are skeptics out there who groan at the idea of wishes upon shooting stars, but there’s still a reason for them to check out the website. The scientist tells the cautionary tale of a woman in the 1950s who was struck with a fragment of a space rock. Luckily, she didn’t die: The meteor piece crashed through her house, ricocheted off her nightstand and hit her, bruising her badly. At the very least, the website will let you know when to get out of the way if a meteor nears. Whatever the reason for your interest in shooting stars or fireballs, know that you’re not alone – and you haven’t been for centuries.
“People are just fascinated with rocks from space,” Cooke states. “It’s very simple to understand why.”
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