Awesome fireball over Germany (video)

From video description, it's taken by russians in the sky above germany.

I have been lucky to see this live some years ago, and it's just amazing, you sudenly feel very small.

Enjoy

www.liveleak.com...

Some small info and another video.

Turns out the fireball described below was the re-entry of the Soyuz booster that brought Expedition 30 up to the International Space Station a few days ago.

blogs.discovermagazine.com... ll-over-germany/

Link to third video.
yfrog.com...

reply to post by Mianeye

That is the re-entry of a Soyuz 3rd stage. Spectacular.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Hard to get an accurate idea of how fast it was traveling but it looked like it was moving mighty slow for a meteor. It actually reminded me of the SS Columbia fiasco.



Don't mind the UFO in the video

WooW that was awesome , but the sad thing is his location where he could not film it completely because of that house , I too was lucky to see one back in 1996 when there was a meteor shower , it was glowing green and even made a shadow of me and my car but didn't last for long because it exploded right in front of my eyes.

reply to post by Phage




For once I have to agree with Phage. I guess there really IS a Santa Claus after all

Originally posted by Human_Alien
Hard to get an accurate idea of how fast it was traveling but it looked like it was moving mighty slow for a meteor. It actually reminded me of the SS Columbia fiasco.

It was slow for a natural meteor, and you are quite right that it is hard to get an accurate idea of the actual speed, but...

Objects in orbit around us (earth) are limited to a certain speed, or else they will no longer remain in orbit, so when something reenters it will almost always be much slower than natural meteoroids which orbit the sun.

I say "almost always" since there is some overlap, and due to parallax/perspective a fast natural meteor could actually appear to be slow or even stationary, depending on the position of the observer in relation to the meteor, but fast natural meteors "burn up" or ablate much quicker than a satellite reentry, which is always going to be a low angle of reentry anyway. Basically low angle and low velocity mean a prolonged meteor/reentry, so we can rule out short lived natural meteors.

To put that into context, the velocity of orbital reentries never exceeds 10 or 11 km/s, where as natural meteoroids in solar orbits enter the atmosphere at relative velocities of between 10 and 73 km/s.

It can be hard to tell the difference between natural and artificial based on appearance alone in the borderline cases (including this case and most satellite/junk reentries IMO), but since we have an actual candidate in this case (a verified Soyuz rocket launch) for the origin of the meteor, and the apparently slow moving meteor in the footage, which crucially fits with the failed launch in terms of apparent velocity, timing and location/heading, that certainly makes the failed launch the obvious source of the meteor and resulting sightings.