Meteor spotted streaking above Texas responsible for sonic booms, NASA says
A bright fireball that was spotted Saturday afternoon in the southeast Texas sky turned out to be a meteor that likely shattered over the Houston area, according to NASA.
Eyewitness accounts in the greater Houston area — including footage from a doorbell camera, a car dashboard camera and video captured at a Little League baseball game — showed a fiery ball of light streaking across a clear, blue sky. NASA said the meteor event occurred at 4:40 p.m. local time, first visible at Stagecoach, northwest of Houston.
“It moved southeast at 35,000 mph, breaking 29 miles above Bammel, just west of Cypress Station,” the agency wrote in an article on X.
Early estimates suggest the meteor was about 3 feet in diameter and weighed about a ton, according to NASA. As the space rock plunged into Earth’s atmosphere, the pressure wave caused sonic booms that were heard by some people in the area.
Sherrie James, a Houston-area resident, said a possible piece of the meteor crashed onto the roof of her home Saturday afternoon. James told NBC News that she was in her bathroom doing her hair when she heard a loud boom and then a loud thud coming from her daughter’s bedroom.
“I just went in and looked, and I saw the hole, and I saw the dent in the ground,” she said.
Next to her daughter’s bed, James found what she described as a “big black rock.”
“And I’m like, what is that?” she said. “And I called my grandson and I said, Look at this. I said, ‘Is that a meteor?’ That’s the first thing that came to mind, because it was all dark.
The suspected meteorite was about the size of a baseball, but James said it appeared heavier than a baseball. She said no one in her household was injured when the rock crashed into her house, despite the surprising nature of the incident.
“It just looked like a rock, and there are no rocks that fall from the sky,” James said.
The American Meteor Society, which tracks fireball events around the world, logged more than 140 reports of Saturday’s meteor in south-central and southeast Texas, including Houston, Katy, College Station, San Antonio and Austin.
NASA said Doppler weather radar indicated meteorites may have fallen over parts of the Houston area stretching between Willowbrook and Northgate Crossing.
Saturday’s meteor sighting comes just four days after another daytime fireball was seen — and heard — in northeast Ohio and parts of Pennsylvania. Bill Cooke, who heads NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, told NBC News at the time that the fireball and sonic booms were likely caused by a small, 7-ton asteroid measuring about 6 feet in diameter. According to Cooke, when the meteor fragmented, it likely released a huge amount of energy, equivalent to 250 tons of TNT.
Early data suggested the meteor was traveling at 45,000 mph in the upper atmosphere before breaking up over Valley City, Ohio. Cooke said the fireball likely produced meteorites around Medina County.
Large meteors that create bright fireballs are relatively rare but are not entirely rare. According to NASA, small space rocks, bits of dust and old rocket parts hit Earth daily, but most burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere.
