WThe following is a list of bolides and fireballs seen on Earth in recent times. These are small asteroids that regularly impact the Earth. Although most are so small that they burn up in the atmosphere before reaching the surface, some larger objects may reach the surface as fragments, known as meteorites. A few of these are detected by NASA's Sentry system, in which case the impact is predicted in advance.
WThe 1783 Great Meteor was an unusually bright bolide observed on 18 August 1783, from the British Isles at a time when such phenomena were not well understood. The meteor was the subject of much discussion in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and was the subject of a detailed study by Charles Blagden.
WThe 1860 Great Meteor procession occurred on July 20, 1860. It was a unique meteoric phenomenon reported from locations across the United States. American landscape painter Frederic Church saw and painted a spectacular string of fireball meteors cross the Catskill evening sky, an extremely rare Earth-grazing meteor procession. It is believed that this was the event referred to in the poem Year of Meteors, 1859-60, by Walt Whitman. In 2010, 150 years later, it was determined to be an Earth-grazing meteor procession.
WThe 1913 Great Meteor Procession occurred on February 9, 1913. It was a meteoric phenomenon reported from locations across Canada, the northeastern United States, and Bermuda, and from many ships at sea, including eight off Brazil, giving a total recorded ground track of over 11,000 km. The meteors were particularly unusual in that there was no apparent radiant, that is to say, no point in the sky from which the meteors appeared to originate. The observations were analysed in detail, later the same year, by the astronomer Clarence Chant, leading him to conclude that as all accounts were positioned along a great circle arc, the source had been a small, short-lived natural satellite of the Earth.
WThe 1930 Curuçá River event refers to the possible fall of objects on 13 August 1930 over the area of Curuçá River in Brazil. It is based on the account of a single investigator who interviewed witnesses to the purported event and then wrote a letter to the Vatican Observatory.
WAn iron meteorite fell on the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, in southeastern Russia, in 1947. Large iron meteorite falls have been witnessed and fragments recovered but never before, in recorded history, a fall of this magnitude. An estimated 23 tonnes of fragments survived the fiery passage through the atmosphere and reached the Earth.
WThe Great Daylight Fireball was an Earth-grazing fireball that passed within 57 kilometres of Earth's surface at 20:29 UTC on August 10, 1972. It entered Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 15 kilometres per second (9.3 mi/s) in daylight over Utah, United States and passed northwards leaving the atmosphere over Alberta, Canada. It was seen by many people and recorded on film and by space-borne sensors. An eyewitness to the event, located in Missoula, Montana, saw the object pass directly overhead and heard a double sonic boom. The smoke trail lingered in the atmosphere for several minutes.
WOn 13 October 1990, meteoroid EN131090, with an estimated mass of 44 kg, entered the Earth's atmosphere above Czechoslovakia and Poland and, after a few seconds, returned to space. Observations of such events are quite rare; this was the second recorded using scientific astronomical instruments and the first recorded from two distant positions, which enabled the calculation of several of its orbital characteristics. The encounter with Earth significantly changed its orbit and, to a smaller extent, some of its physical properties.
WThe 2002 Vitim event or Bodaybo event is believed to be an impact by a bolide (fireball) in the Vitim River basin. It occurred near the town of Bodaybo in the Mamsko-Chuisky district of Irkutsk Oblast, Siberia, Russia on September 25, 2002 at approximately 22:00. The event was detected by a US military missile-defense satellite.
WThe 2002 Eastern Mediterranean Event was a high-energy upper atmosphere explosion over the Mediterranean Sea, around 34°N 21°E on June 6, 2002. This explosion, similar in power to a small atomic bomb, has been related to a small asteroid undetected while approaching Earth. The object disintegrated in an air burst impact and no meteorite fragments were recovered. The air burst occurred over the sea.
WThe Carancas impact event refers to the fall of the Carancas chondritic meteorite on September 15, 2007, near the village of Carancas in Peru, close to the Bolivian border and Lake Titicaca. The impact created a small crater in the clay soil and scorched earth around its location. A local official, Marco Limache, said that "boiling water started coming out of the crater, and particles of rock and cinders were found nearby", as "fetid, noxious" gases spewed from the crater. Surface impact occurred above 3,800 metres (12,500 ft).
W2008 TC3 (Catalina Sky Survey temporary designation 8TA9D69) was an 80-tonne (80-long-ton; 90-short-ton), 4.1-meter (13 ft) diameter asteroid that entered Earth's atmosphere on October 7, 2008. It exploded at an estimated 37 kilometers (23 mi) above the Nubian Desert in Sudan. Some 600 meteorites, weighing a total of 10.5 kilograms (23.1 lb), were recovered; many of these belonged to a rare type known as ureilites, which contain, among other minerals, nanodiamonds.
WThe 2009 Sulawesi superbolide was an atmospheric fireball blast over Indonesia on October 8, 2009, at approximately 03:00 UTC, near the coastal city of Watampone in South Sulawesi, island of Sulawesi. The meteoritic impactor broke up at an estimated height of 15–20 km. The impact energy of the bolide was estimated in the 10 to 50 kiloton TNT equivalent range with the higher end of this range being more likely. The likely size of the impactor was 5–10 m diameter.
W2014 AA was a small Apollo near-Earth asteroid roughly 2–4 meters in diameter that struck Earth on 2 January 2014. It was discovered on 1 January 2014 by Richard Kowalski at the Mount Lemmon Survey at an apparent magnitude of 19 using a 1.52-meter (60 in) reflecting telescope at Mount Lemmon Observatory. 2014 AA was only observed over a short observation arc of about 70 minutes, and entered Earth's atmosphere about 21 hours after discovery. Nonetheless it remains one of only a few asteroids observed before impact.
WOn September 7, 2015, at about 08:40 local time a bolide meteor appeared over Thailand and burned up approximately 100 km (62 mi) above the ground. The meteor briefly flared up producing a green and orange glow before disappearing without a sound of explosion and leaving a white smoke trail. The meteor was recorded by several dashcams during the morning rush hour in Bangkok, and sightings were also reported in Thai towns of Kanchanaburi and Nakhon Ratchasima. The meteor was visible for about four seconds before fading out. As of September 8, 2015 no strewn field has been found. The impact energy was the largest of 2015 at 3.9 kiloton. The last impact this large was on 23 August 2014 over the Southern Ocean.
W2018 LA, also known as ZLAF9B2, was a small Apollo near-Earth asteroid 2.6–3.8 m (9–12 ft) in mean diameter that impacted the atmosphere with small fragments reaching the Earth at roughly 16:44 UTC on 2 June 2018 near the border of Botswana and South Africa. It had been discovered only 8 hours earlier by the Mount Lemmon Survey, Arizona and based on 1 1⁄2 hours of observations, was calculated to have a roughly 85% chance of impact likely somewhere between Australia and Madagascar. Hours later, a report arrived to the American Meteor Society that an observer from Botswana had seen a bright fireball. After the impact, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) released observations roughly 2 hours after the other reported observations which confirmed that the asteroid had indeed impacted Earth on a grazing path as per the observed fireball. A preliminary analysis of the pre-impact evolution of this meteoroid suggests that it may be part of a dynamical grouping.
W2019 MO, temporarily designated A10eoM1, was a small, harmless 3-meter near-Earth asteroid discovered by ATLAS–MLO that impacted Earth's atmosphere on 22 June 2019 at 21:25 UT. The impact of the bolide was detected by infrasound and generated a 5-kiloton-equivalent explosion off the south coast of Puerto Rico. The strewn field would be spread over the Caribbean Sea.
WThe Chelyabinsk meteor was a superbolide that entered Earth's atmosphere over Russia on 15 February 2013 at about 09:20 YEKT. It was caused by an approximately 20 m (66 ft) near-Earth asteroid with a speed of 19.16 ± 0.15 kilometres per second. It quickly became a brilliant superbolide meteor over the southern Ural region. The light from the meteor was brighter than the Sun, visible up to 100 km (62 mi) away. It was observed over a wide area of the region and in neighbouring republics. Some eyewitnesses also felt intense heat from the fireball.
WThe Chelyabinsk meteorite is the fragmented remains of the large Chelyabinsk meteor of 15 February 2013 which reached the ground after the meteor's passage through the atmosphere. The descent of the meteor, visible as a brilliant superbolide in the morning sky, caused a series of shock waves that shattered windows, damaged approximately 7,200 buildings and left 1,500 people injured. The resulting fragments were scattered over a wide area.
WThe Kamchatka meteor was a meteor that exploded in an air burst off the east coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Russia on 18 December 2018. At around midday, local time, an asteroid roughly 10 meters in diameter entered the atmosphere at a speed of 32.0 km/s (72,000 mph), with a TNT equivalent energy of 173 kilotons, more than 10 times the energy of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The object entered at a steep angle of 7 degrees, close to the zenith, terminating in an air burst at an altitude of around 25 km.
WThe Murchison meteorite is a meteorite that fell in Australia in 1969 near Murchison, Victoria. It belongs to a group of meteorites rich in organic compounds. Due to its mass and the fact that it was an observed fall, the Murchison meteorite is one of the most studied of all meteorites.
WThe Novato meteorite is an ordinary chondrite which entered the earth's atmosphere and broke up over Northern California at 19:44 Pacific Time on 17 October 2012. The fireball created sonic booms and fragmented. The meteoroid was about 35 centimeters (14 in) across.
WThe Sutter's Mill meteorite is a carbonaceous chondrite which entered the Earth's atmosphere and broke up at about 07:51 Pacific Time on April 22, 2012, with fragments landing in the United States. The name comes from the Sutter's Mill, a California Gold Rush site, near which some pieces were recovered. Meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens assigned Sutter's Mill (SM) numbers to each meteorite, with the documented find location preserving information about where a given meteorite was located in the impacting meteoroid. As of May 2014, 79 fragments had been publicly documented with a find location. The largest (SM53) weighs 205 grams (7.2 oz), and the second largest (SM50) weighs 42 grams (1.5 oz).
WThe Tunguska event was a massive explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate, Russia, on the morning of 30 June 1908 (NS). The explosion over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi) of forest, and eyewitness reports suggest that at least three people may have died in the event. The explosion is generally attributed to the air burst of a stony meteoroid about 100 metres in size. It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres rather than to have hit the surface of the Earth.
WWT1190F was a small temporary satellite of Earth that impacted Earth on 13 November 2015 at 06:18:34.3 UTC. It is thought to have been space debris from the trans-lunar injection stage of the 1998 Lunar Prospector mission. It was first discovered on 18 February 2013 by the Catalina Sky Survey. It was then lost, and reacquired on 29 November 2013. It was again discovered on 3 October 2015 by astronomer Rose Garcia with the Catalina Sky Survey 60-inch telescope, and the object was soon identified to be the same as the two objects previously sighted by the team, who have been sharing their data through the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC). An early orbit calculation showed that it was orbiting Earth in an extremely elliptical orbit, taking it from within the geosynchronous satellite ring to nearly twice the distance of the Moon. It was also probably the same object as 9U01FF6, another object on a similar orbit discovered on 26 October 2009.