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There's a shoot-out of expert opinion over what caused a mysterious boom and a fiery object in the sky over Maryland and Virginia.
Space dot com leaped into the fray early, declaring that the sightings over Norfolk and Virigina Beach were pieces of a Russian Soyuz. That rocket had launched the Expedition 19 crew to the space station on March 26. They quoted Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory:
I'm pretty convinced that what these folks saw was the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched the crew up to the space station.
The story was quickly picked up by other space-related outlets. Chester said that he'd run computerized tracking programs and he was "99.04%" sure.
Not so fast. Not everyone agrees.
Frank Roylance of MarylandWeather dot com declared that he thought it was a meteor. And he provided his own expert, satellite tracker Ted Molczan, who said that Chester is mistaken:
The U.S. Strategic Command's final report on this decay, predicted decay over 24 N, 125 E, [near Taiwan] on 2009 Mar 30, within 1 minute of 03:57 UTC (11:57 PM EDT).
It [the Soyuz, ed] did pass within sight of the Virginia and Maryland Sunday night, but at about 9:26 PM EDT, about 2.5 hours before decay. It was 137 km high, but that is far too high to have begun burning. Burning begins a little below 100 km. The object was in Earth's shadow, so it was invisible, because it was not burning yet.
So there you have it. He said-he said.
What do you think?
Image credit/Russian Space Agency
Enjoy: prior meteors/fireballs and space junk stories.
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