At exactly 03.58h Monday morning, a fireball streaked across the Andalusian sky, whose entry was registered by the Hita Observatory (Toledo).
But it wasn’t the only observatory because the one on Sierra Nevada, and the ones in Huelva and Sevilla did, too.
These observatories are all connected and input into the SMART Project, which tracks all entries into the atmosphere by meteors from the Solar System and beyond.
According to Professor José María Madiedo (Universidad de Huelva), who heads the project, the fireball was caused by a piece of rock from a comet, entering the Earth’s atmosphere at 118,000 KPH, doing a handbrake turn (just joking) over the north of the Province of Málaga at a height of 99 kilometres, burning out at an altitude of 32 KM over the province of Córdoba.
He pointed out that it is not usual that rocks from comets reach such a low altitude before disintegrating – they’re normally made of ‘dirty ice;’ that’s to say small fragments of rock encased in ice that burn out between 80 and 70 kilometres up. That this one lasted so long indicates that it had a very hard core, similar to an asteroid.
(News: Andalucia)