Don’t worry, it’s just a meteor
Fireball over Tex. stirs fear before NASA confirms space rock
A flash in the sky that sent residents of Texas’ Lower Rio Grande Valley into a panic Wednesday afternoon was confirmed to be a meteor.
Questions regarding the “fireball” that created a “loud explosion” were finally answered when officials in South Texas announced confirmation of a meteorite strike, AccuWeather reports.
“We believe we’ve solved the mystery of the loud explosion,” Hidalgo County Sheriff Eddie Guerra said in a news conference Thursday.
According to NASA experts, at 5:28 p.m. on Wednesday, a meteor measuring roughly two feet across and weighing around 1,000 pounds entered the airspace. The object was traveling at “about 27,000 mph and it had an energy of 8 tons of TNT” before it broke into fragments about 21 miles from the ground.
Most of the meteor burned up in the atmosphere before hitting Earth, but “radar and other data indicate that meteorites did reach the ground from this event,” NASA said.
The National Weather Service in
Brownsville said a satellite system designed to measure lightning strikes also was able to detect the meteor.
But, in light of recent news regarding mysterious objects in the sky, many people who heard the “ground-rattling blast” feared calamity.
“It created panic throughout the city,” said Mission Police Chief Cesar Torres, according to USA Today.
Earlier this month, U.S. military jets shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic Ocean.
Several days later, the U.S. shot down another airborne object over Lake Huron, the Pentagon reported. It followed the downing of an unidentified object over northern Canada, one day after a separate object had been shot down over Alaskan airspace.
“Obviously with all these incidents close, you can imagine what our constituents’ and our citizens’ fears were,” Guerra said.
“It can frighten our residents, and we want to make sure that we give as much information to our residents to help them feel safe and secure here in our local community,” said U.S. Rep. Mónica de la Cruz, who represents the area.