Maryland-based Tesla records video of fireball meteor heading towards New York
Ty Wishnow, who lives in the Hagerstown area, was driving along Halfway Boulevard at 1:41 a.m. on Dec. 5, 2023, when he saw a fireball meteor to the north.
Ty Wishnow, who lives in the Hagerstown area, was driving to his late shift at the FedEx distribution center in Halfway around 1:41 a.m. on Dec. 5 when his sunroof lit up in the dark night.
“The whole top of the car lit up. It looked like daylight for a second. It was scary,” said Wishnau, who owns a Tesla Model 3 with a full glass roof.
Wishnow, 25, said it looked like a bright object was falling from the sky in front of him and landing in the Hagerstown area.
He immediately thought it might be a meteorite or a meteorite. Wishnow, an operations manager at FedEx Ground, showed some of his colleagues a video of the flashing meteor taken by Tesla, and they suggested it might be fireworks or aliens.
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The object seemed large enough that Wishnow said he wondered if he should evacuate in case of impact.
Wishnow was right about it being a meteorite.
The object was confirmed to be a bolide meteor. American Meteor Society.
Wishnow contacted the association’s operations manager, Mike Hankey, and sent him the video Tesla had saved after Wishnow pressed the horn. There are multiple cameras installed inside the vehicle for safety and security. When you press the horn, the car will save the latest dashcam video footage. Wishnow’s meteor sighting reports are part of the Meteor Society’s official records. Event 7572-2023.
Wishnaw’s report was one of 23 reports the organization received about a bolide meteor that took a course far north.
What is a bolide meteor?
“This is a random fireball meteor, a piece of rock, metal and ice from a comet or asteroid,” Hankey wrote in an email to the Herald-Mail. “These bright meteors occur somewhere every day, but they are rarer than typical meteor showers or shooting stars. They are usually random events unrelated to meteor showers, but meteor showers include fireballs. It may occur.”
The underlying material is typically larger than a bolide meteor, giving off more energy as it travels faster through Earth’s atmosphere, making it brighter, Hankey explained.
If the material survives to the surface, as sometimes happens with fireballs, it is a meteorite.
“In this case, the material likely melted and evaporated, leaving nothing behind,” Hankey wrote. According to the Meteor Society’s analysis of this bolide meteor event, the material was fragile, like ice, and completely evaporated at about 40 kilometers above Earth’s surface.
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Where was the meteor heading?
According to the Meteor Society’s predictions, its orbit was heading toward an area west-southwest of Albany, New York.
It’s about a 340-mile drive northeast of where Wishnow discovered the meteorite.
Hankey said the fireball’s estimated average speed was about 25 kilometers per second. This equates to 55,923.4 miles per hour.
This is consistent with meteors traveling at speeds ranging from about 10 kilometers per second up to more than 73 kilometers per second. 70 kilometers per second is equivalent to 156,586 miles per hour.
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“I’ve never really seen anything like it, anything this big.”
Wishnaw said he was “touched” to find out it was a real meteorite.
“I’ve never seen anything like that, anything that big. You can’t really tell just by looking at it on camera. It literally lit up the whole sunroof of the car in the middle of the night.”
Hankey said the meteor was “interesting because of its brightness and is an amazing sight for those who witness it.”
All sightings of the meteor reported to the organization were from areas southeast of the planned landing site and clockwise southwest. The furthest report was from Ruckersville, Virginia, northeast of Staunton.
Residents of Emmitsburg, Maryland, in northern Frederick County, also reported seeing a meteor. The observer, identified as Brian K., reported seeing a “glowing train” that changed color from green to yellow.
Wishnow said he was also impressed that the Tesla sedan’s camera was powerful enough to capture the falling meteorite.
Hankey said this is the first time the Meteor Society has captured a fireball video with a Tesla and submitted it to the organization’s fireball program. That program was created in his 1930s.
If the Meteor Association can figure out a way to contact Tesla users, or to alert Tesla drivers to fireball events and submit their observations, it could potentially “build the world’s largest network of fireball cameras.” He writes that there is.
But based on how many fireballs form in Earth’s atmosphere every day, even that network won’t be able to capture most of them.
According to the Meteor Society’s website, thousands of these meteors occur every day, with the majority occurring in uninhabited areas and over oceans. And some things are “hidden in the sunlight” and cannot be seen.
This particular meteor was recorded by two of the Meteor Society’s ALLSKY7 meteor cameras, allowing society officials to fully “solve” the event, Hankey wrote.