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(meteorobs) October 7 fireball over western US



Friends:
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'Big ball of fire' seen in western sky probably a meteor, experts say

By Will Ryan and Jim Kirksey, The Denver Post

**

Monday, October 07, 2002 - A fireball with a long tail streaked
westward across the western United States' sky Sunday night,
causing witnesses from Boulder to Durango to Salt Lake City and
even Idaho to call authorities with vivid descriptions of what
was probably a meteor burning up in Earth's atmosphere.

"We've gotten several reports of brilliant white light the size
of a basketball with blue flames turning to orange," Chaffee
County sheriff dispatcher Jeanette Stephens said.

Debbie Taylor, staff duty officer with the Federal Aviation
Administration in Seattle, said she got calls from Denver, Salt
Lake City and Idaho, and the observers "called it everything
possible from a UFO to a fireball to a meteor to a mid-air
collision."

There were no mid-air collisions Sunday night, she added. She
received the first call on the object at 7:28 p.m., she said.

"What people saw are the characteristics of a meteor," said
Denver Museum of Nature & Science spokeswoman Julia Taylor. "The
different colors are from the chemical composition of the meteor
as it burns and cools."

Douglas Duncan, the director of the Fiske Planetarium at the
University of Colorado at Boulder, said that fireballs are
usually meteors or man-made space debris entering the
atmosphere.

Duncan said that it is difficult to judge how large a meteor is
by how bright or how big it looks.

"A big, bright one looks pretty close, but we know that they
burn 60 to 100 miles up," Duncan said, adding that the space
shuttle and the Hubble telescope orbit approximately 300 miles
above the Earth.

A meteorite is a meteor that does not burn up in Earth's
atmosphere and falls to the ground.

If witnesses over a large area view the meteor, Duncan said, it
is possible to triangulate an approximate position for a
meteorite, but he said the chances of finding a meteorite are
small because they are hard to distinguish from surrounding
rocks.

A spokeswoman at the Boulder County Communications Center said
they received calls from east Boulder, Arvada and Allenspark,
saying the "big ball of fire" seemed headed toward the
Continental Divide.

No man-made object fell from space Sunday night, said Maj. Ed
Thomas, a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense
Command in Colorado Springs, which tracks satellites and
thousands of pieces of space debris.

"We don't have a mission to track meteorites, but that's got to
be what it is," he said.

Taylor said the museum would like to hear from any witnesses in
western Colorado who saw or videotaped the fireball so that
their "meteorite search team" can try to locate the fallen
object.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

**

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