Because sometimes it kind of does.
Picture a space rock. This one was 3 feet wide, but it weighed about a ton and moved at a speed of about 35,000 miles per hour across the sky, just 50 miles above Houston on Saturday.
The meteor’s trajectory, which NASA gives the tongue-in-cheek title of its “Chicken Little trajectory,” flew above the Tomball and Cypress areas, just about 15 miles west of George Bush Intercontinental Airport.
Barreling through the Earth’s atmosphere, there’s an immense amount of pressure on the rock. Eventually, as with most such space rocks, called meteors, the pressure was too great, and it caused the meteor to break apart, creating an explosion about 30 miles above North Houston. NASA said the explosion had the energy of about 26 tons of TNT, the equivalent of about 100 lightning strikes happening at once.
“It is ironic that NASA spends millions and billions of dollars to collect rocks from space, and one comes to visit all by itself,” said Carolyn Sumners, vice president for astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
Many southeast Texans said they heard the explosion when the meteor broke through the sound barrier on Saturday afternoon. Turning their heads to the sky, a few fragments of space rock called meteorites began falling over the course of 8 minutes, if they didn’t burn up on the way to the ground.
“If a meteorite explodes, it will leave what’s called a ‘strewn field,’” Sean Gulick, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said on Texas Standard. “It’s sort of a directional travel — from how it was traveling — it will blow up and leave fragments on the ground.”
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Less than a week prior to Saturday’s meteor explosion in Houston, something similar happened above Cleveland, Ohio — albeit with an even larger meteor.
A 6-foot, 7-ton space rock broke apart on the morning of March 17, causing a similar sonic boom and similar meteorite fragments to hit the Earth. The two phenomena occurring just days apart from one another had many watching the sky, asking how to be prepared.
“In general, the Earth’s atmosphere is struck by objects from space with regularity,” Gulick said. “It just has to be a large enough object that it gets close enough to the ground before burning up that it can make an explosion and actually make pieces arrive on the ground. Most of the time, what you see are basically shooting stars: they’re high up enough, they just burn up, and that’s it.”
Anywhere between once a year and once a decade, an asteroid the size of a car reaches the Earth’s atmosphere. Most often, it burns up and creates a massive fireball before it can reach the surface of the Earth.
As the story notes, a piece of that falling star made an uninvited visit to a local homeowner. Fortunately, as the story also notes, meteorite strikes do tend to be covered by insurance. Both NASA and weather radar stations tracked the flight of this object. I don’t have anything brilliant to say about all this, but as it happens I very briefly saw a shooting star last Friday around 5 AM as I was on my morning walk. Not the same as this, and what I saw was both much smaller and didn’t make any noise, but it was cool. I can’t recall ever seeing anything like it before. Anyway, like I said, very cool.