A giant fireball lights up the New England sky as it blazes through Earth's atmosphere caught in the dashcam video of police Sgt. Tim Farris's cruiser while he was on patrol early Tuesday morning.
The apparent trail of a meteor at about 12:50 a.m. was captured while Farris was parked in front of the Central Fire Station on Congress Street while he was looking for speeders. The video was shared on the Portland Police Department Facebook page which was shared, commented and liked by thousands of people.
Operations manager of the American Meteor Society, Mike Hankey, said that fireballs happen pretty regularly when certain debris hit the Earth's atmosphere creating friction and heat. Hankey also added that the debris on the video appears to be a car-sized asteroid.
"Debris from space hits Earth all the time," Hankey said according to CNN. "The bigger the debris, the bigger the flash of light."
The society received around 240 reports of the sightings from New Jersey to Quebec, Canada and from areas in between. This means that the fireball penetrated deep into the atmosphere and most have produced harmless meteorites on Earth, USA Today reported. Witnesses were asked to fill out an official “fireball report” in its website.
"These are totally harmless events and they happen every day on the planet," Hankey said. "But for an individual to see something like this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing -- just the odds of you being the in the right place at the right time."
Barbra Barrett, the director of the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum in Bethel, is inviting witnesses to contact her about the sighting in order to determine the trajectory for the meteoroid wherein its “terminal explosion” took place about 30 kilometers west of Rangeley in Franklin County.
They would like to recover the said meteoroid if it didn't disintegrate in the atmosphere so it could be included in the mineral museum since it was recently planned to establish a Maine Fireball Network. Said museum will install cameras in different areas of the state which can also determine the trajectory and speed of the fireball.
“I think there’s a real possibility here to recover the meteorite. It’s a unique opportunity for Maine to see and possibly recover a meteorite after seeing a fireball in the sky,” Barrett said, according to Press Herald. "While we wish we were already operational, I’m just glad this didn’t happen last week as it would have been one heck of a distraction.”
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