Event: 20240823-014440

Over two hundred eyewitnesses in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia have filed reports of a bright fireball that lit up the skies at 9:45 pm Eastern Daylight Time on August 22 (23 August 2024 01:45 UTC). The event was also detected by several cameras in the region and the Geostationary Lightning Mappers on the GOES 16 and 18 satellites; analysis of the currently available data indicate the following:

The meteor first became visible at an altitude of 53 miles above the Kentucky town of Clementsville, moving a little south of west at 51,000 miles per hour. The object managed to travel 30 miles through the upper atmosphere before disintegrating 30 miles above the small town of Exie. The breakup of the fireball unleashed an energy of about 10 tons of TNT, which generated a pressure wave that traveled to the ground; this wave is responsible for the noises heard by some eyewitnesses. The data indicate that the fireball was produced by a meteoroid about 20 inches in diameter, weighing roughly 400 pounds. At this time, it is not known whether this event produced meteorites on the ground.

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Images and Video from NASA and Western University's Southern Ontario Meteor Network

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Event Data