(meteorobs) The Hayabusa 'meteor' - a lesson for us?

[Daniel Fischer]

I reckon by now you've all watched the amazing video clips of the disintegration
of the Hayabusa main craft over Australia, recorded from a NASA airplane -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-Xp_-_gLTA from one camera,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfYA4f-AIL0 from another one - and from
the ground (as in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IAX9Hsloq4 on TV and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPUxTSPN_bQ from a live webcast).

The similarity to a major bolide event is striking, up to the color phenomena,
as has been noted by some already. Now we used to believe that - even just
based on videos on the web - it is easy to tell a natural bolide from a
man-made satellite reentry, with the much slower speed of the latter being
the most important argument. Thus after the Texas bolide of 15 Feb 2009 - see
http://cosmos4u.blogspot.com/2009/02/texas-fireball-leads-to-meteorite-finds.html
for many links - the astronomers got it right from the beginning while many
others continued to believe in some satellite-related phenomenon for days.

Now ... if yesterday's Aussie fireball had surprised you, would you have
been able to tell from the video evidence alone that this was *not* a meteoroid
burning up? Even though some of the videos look (to me, at least) shockingly
like e.g. the similarly well recorded Peekskill bolide. The latter was rather
slow in the sky, while Hayabusa came in very fast (12.2 km/s) - this may explain
a lot. But I'm still wondering whether the some *other* distinguishing feature
that would have allowed one to tell for sure that the Aussie event was a reeentry.

Daniel