I think I just saw the Russian sattellite just plummet back to earth !!!

9:28 PM east coast time I went outside to smoke a cigarette. I always watch the skys for shooting stars or whatever. What I saw was different that anything I have ever seen before. I have seen HUGH meteorites before even in broad daylight but this was different. For those that want coordinates this is the best that I can do. It was traveling from north west to south east. I am in Allandale Florida and the direction it was falling would have taken it just east of cape canaveral by line of sight. It was slow compared to 99% of the meteorites I have seen. It was visable from straight overhead almost all the way to the horizon. It changed colors as it fell. Red, yellow, green and some blues. I know a little about metals on fire and green is an indication of copper. I am not sure just how much copper would naturally be found in a meteorite if any at all. The tail was half the length of the fall and it was 10 to 15 times the size of the normal average meteorites that I see. But the colors were great. Never saw any meteorite give off colors before so it was really cool to see.

The best I ever saw was a meteorite traveling south to due north along the east coast of Virginia in 2001 at about 5-6am in the spring. Dont remember what month but I thought that it was a plane on fire it was so big and moved so slowly. I watched it for a full 3 minutes as it traveled out of site leaving a smoke trail 500 times the size of an airplane contrail. I never heard anything about it on the news.

If anyone has any ideas of what I saw tonight please chip in. Thanks

reply to post by candcantiques


The failed Russian Phobos-Grunt probe to Mars moon Phobos, that never got out of Earth orbit is suppose to degrade and hit atmosphere any day now.
Might be what you saw was that?

Then again, coulda just been standard bolide. or anything, really. I guessing.

reply to post by nineix


My apologies. Thats the one I meant. I thought it was Chinese. I am not sure what a standard bolide is. Do they give off colors like that? Never saw the colors before.

reply to post by candcantiques


There was a Chinese space probe on the spacecraft also. Yinghuo 1 orbiter.

reply to post by nineix


Wow they can give off colors. I never knew that because I never saw one like that before. I have seen thousands of meteors but never the colors. Chalk one up for a new experience. Thanks

Originally posted by candcantiques
reply to post by nineix

 

My apologies. Thats the one I meant. I thought it was Chinese. I am not sure what a standard bolide is. Do they give off colors like that? Never saw the colors before.

bolide [ˈbəʊlaɪd -lɪd]
n
(Astronomy) a large exceptionally bright meteor that often explodes Also called fireball
[from French, from bolis missile; see ballista]

I like to think of Bolides as the Las Vegas, or Hollywood version of the regular shooting star. What you see all depends on meteor composition. It might be colorful fireball, or fireball that explodes into a bunch of pretty sparkles, or what you described.


UPDATE: You probably did not see Phobos Grunt because, evidently, according to several news sources it's due to crash on Sunday in the Indian Ocean.
SPACE.com

reply to post by nineix


This thing, whatever it was, changed colors as it was falling. I was shocked to see the color changes. Especially green and blue. I went to Wikipedia with the word bolide and it told me there they could change colors. Been watching the skys every night since I was a kid ( i'm 45) and never saw one change colors. Guess I just got lucky.

reply to post by candcantiques


thumbs up on the sky watching.

I do the same, and have been doing the same since I use to sneak out of the house at night after my parents went to sleep when I was 5years old.

I saw the same thing that you saw! (coincidentally I was outside smoking and looking at the stars) I ran to the computer and searched for "did a satellite just fall out of orbit"

My search was vague and generalized, but later I found that a Russian satellite called Mars Probe Phobos-Grunt was expected to fall to earth on Sunday.

It was quite an amazing sight to see.

hope someone got pics i doubt it tho

One Phobos_Grunt reentry link.

Phobos-Grunt orbital tracking link.

Ah, here we go, the Phobos_grunt orbital crawl tracker.

Apparently, it's still up there.

You know SOMEONE have a Video on the social site's...

I'm just glad that someone else saw it! I tried to wake up my wife to explain what I saw, but she was in a deep sleep. SNORING AND EVERYTHING!!! so I let her sleep

reply to post by Illustronic


well, I guess I will have to remove the post that I left a few minutes ago.

that's what I get for posting before I get the whole story...

well, back to square one........... now its really gonna keep me up all night!!!

I am sitting on the front porch with my laptop, just waiting...

reply to post by candcantiques


looks like others saw it too
lunarmeteoritehunters.blogspot.com...
MBIQ Indicates South Carolina, Alabama, Florida Meteor Fireball 11JAN2012

reply to post by candcantiques


You said it was "slow", and it is indeed true that satellites are relatively slow compared to natural meteors in general, in terms of relative velocity. But the apparent velocity depends on both the relative velocity as well as perspective, so a meteor can appear to be moving very slowly, or even not at all depending on perspective.

What is just as important in determining a possible culprit is how long it lasted. Satellite reentries tend to last much longer, and can take a few minutes to cross the sky. Even the slowest natural meteors won't take much more than about a minute to cross the sky from "horizon to horizon" (or close to it), so I'd be pretty confident that what you saw in 2001 was a satellite reentry.

Here are a couple of examples. Mir (coincidentally although I don't think that was what you saw) on March 23 2001 from Fiji, and a Russian SL-4 rocket body that re-entered the atmosphere over Colorado and Wyoming.





As for the colours, yes, meteors, especially brighter meteors, can often have vivid colours, but it's not quite as simple as composition of the meteoroid alone, as I explained in this thread here a few weeks back. The green color you saw was most likely due to the OIII forbidden emission line of atmospheric Oxygen (see below). Copper is not generally found in meteorites or in the spectral emission lines of meteors as far as I'm aware.

I don't believe there is much evidence to support the idea that meteor
color (as seen with the eye) has much relationship to the meteoroid
composition- at least, when we are talking about fireballs. There is good evidence, however, that the color is mainly the from ionization of atmospheric gas- especially oxygen. I've personally collected images of
several bright fireballs through a 501 nm narrow band (6 nm) filter,
which argues for a very strong [OIII] component to the light.

FWIW, a quick review of the meteor reports (nearly all fireballs) I've
received in the last 11 years shows this:

9110 reports total
3735 (41%) report some sort of color
3069 (82% of those reporting color) report some shade of green

I've long since concluded that bright fireballs are almost always green.
The exceptional cases are those which are not (and these are almost
always reported as white).

The only other color that tends to show up in witness descriptions is
red/orange, and a close look reveals that this is almost always at the
end of the path, when it is easily explained as the output of a cooling
blackbody radiator.

Chris

*******************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory

Source: METEOROBS (The Meteor Observing mailing list)

Try this google search for lots of reading on the subject.