Fireball passed over Petersburg from the Northeast

Marc Fries a scientist at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX. continues his work to track the Petersburg fireball, which passed over Petersburg early on Saturday, Nov. 21. Fries told the Pilot, via email on Wednesday, “I’ve been able to find the location of the camera at the harbor with sufficient accuracy to plot the azimuth from the camera towards the fireball.  Shadows from the fireball are clearly

visible in that camera image. The blue line in the Google Earth image is the direction towards the bright flash,” explained Fries. The Pilot sent Fries copies of the harbor video surveillance footage that showed a bright flash of light lasting for two seconds on nearly all its camera feeds at 2:25 a.m.

Fries received images showing the fireball from the Petersburg Water plant camera and is using those images to more closely track the path of the fireball. Mike Bell who works at the plant provided those images.

Also, fellow scientist Rob Matson did some work triangulating the sonic booms that appear on nearby seismometers.  He believes that the fireball had its loudest sonic boom to the northeast of Petersburg and across the sound, according to Fries.  

“I’ve also asked for data from the Department of Defense from their satellite-based explosion monitoring system, which routinely detects fireballs and makes the data publicly available:

(http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/fireballs/)  Their JPL-based outlet for those data has not updated their data lately and I’ve asked them to do so,” added Fries.

Using data provided from these numerous sources, Fries has been able to track the possible fireball path over Petersburg.

“Based on the data we have at this time, I believe it traveled from NE to SW (roughly) along the red line in this image.  This is a rough approximation at this point, but it matches the seismometer-based reports of an initial sonic boom to the NE, video capture of subsequent breakup events (bright flashes) to the north and northwest, and radar returns near the terminus of the red line.  This is an investigation and the estimated track may change as new data come in, but this is the current estimate, explained Fries.

Fries added that he is interested in both eyewitness reports on the sonic booms and any other video that may show the fireball flashes. Fries email is