SHT - Great ball of fire

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Goodness! Gracious! A Great Ball of Fire

Associated Press

Thursday, September 6, 2001; 11:36 AM

A fiery object streaked across the sky over much of the East Coast early Thursday, and Navy officials said it was a Russian rocket that re-entered the atmosphere after orbiting Earth since 1975.

The SL3 rocket body re-entered the atmosphere shortly before 6 a.m. about 100 miles off Delaware, said Navy Cmdr. Rod Gibbons, a spokesman for the U.S. Space Command at Colorado Springs, Colo.

“The object was not designed to survive re-entry” and likely burned up before any pieces could reach the ground, Gibbons said.

Petty Officer James Geist at the Coast Guard’s Indian River, Del., station said no reports had been received of the rocket striking any ships at sea.

People from Massachusetts to North Carolina reported seeing the object.

Gibbons said the rocket was one of 8,300 man-made objects the center is tracking in space. Some 17,000 such objects have re-entered Earth’s atmosphere since the late 1950s, he said.

The center began stepping up its surveillance of the rocket seven days ago, Gibbons said, adding that the Space Command generally can’t predict the exact time and location that an object will re-enter the atmosphere.

Charles Tekula, 49, a commercial fisherman in Long Island, was with his son at about 5:30 a.m. when he saw the sky light up.

“At first thought it was a jetliner coming toward us, but then I saw a smoke trail,” he said.

“My son said it looked like a big, slow-moving firework across the sky.” Tekula said. “We were speechless, it was the most fantastic thing I’d ever seen.”

Officials at the National Weather Service and the Naval Observatory had earlier speculated that the object was a meteor.

But Naval Observatory spokesman Geoff Chester later concurred that debris from the rocket booster, launched in 1975 to put up a satellite, was the source of the bright lights.

“The satellite itself came down in 1992,” Chester said. “And this is basically the gas tank that got it up there. And that pretty much is what it was.”

© 2001 The Associated Press

-- Anonymous, September 06, 2001

Answers

Ah, I guess this was the "meteor"...

-- Anonymous, September 06, 2001

So they say...

-- Anonymous, September 07, 2001

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