Mystery Flash and Big Boom Rattles Virginia

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SPACE.com Space.com Staff
space.com 1 hr 59 mins ago

A mysterious boom and light occurred over the skies of Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Va., on Sunday night, but just what caused the phenomenon is still unknown.

Calls from local residents to 911 began coming in at around 9:45 p.m. EDT, with some people reporting their doors and windows rattled when the boom went off, according to reports from WVEC-TV.

Similar reports in the past often have turned out to involve meteors, which can explode in the atmosphere to create a loud noise and bright flash of light that streaks across the sky. However, often times the source of events like this are not determined.

In a recent scientific first, meteorite fragments of an asteroid that was spotted in space before it exploded over the African desert in October were recently recovered and examined by scientists.

The jury is still out as to what caused Sunday's event.

Local National Weather Service meteorologists have been in touch with the U.S. Navy, Air Force and NASA, but have not heard back these sources and don't know whether they are actively investigating the cause of the boom, said Wakefield NWS forecaster Jeff Lewitsky.

"The only thing we know for sure at this point is that it wasn't meteorologically related," Lewitsky told SPACE.com.

Lewitsky said meteorologists have looked back at their radar and lightning strike data during the time period and didn't find anything that could explain the event. He also said they had received no more reports on the incident and no photos of the light streak have come in.

Officials at Norfolk International Airport had received reports of the light and explosion, but hadn't observed anything out of the ordinary at the airport, according to WVEC-TV.

The National Weather Service told WVEC-TV that the reports of the light and the bang were coming in from Maryland to North Carolina.

The National Weather Service released a statement at 11:17 p.m. Sunday:

"Numerous reports have been called in to this office and into local law enforcement concerning what appeared to be flashes of light in the sky over the Suffolk/Virginia Beach area. We are confident in saying that this was not lightning ... and have been in contact with military and other government agencies to determine the cause. So far ... we have not seen or heard of any damage from this and will continue to inquire as to the cause."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20090330/s...esvirginia

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Mysterious East Coast Boom Was Falling Russian Rocket

SPACE.com andrea Thompson
senior Writer
space.com Mon Mar 30, 2:52 pm ET

The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. 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," said Jeff Chester of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

Residents of the areas around Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Va., began calling 911 last night with reports of hearing a loud boom and seeing a streak of light that lit up the sky, according to news reports.

Chester heard about the incident this morning; the Naval Observatory gets plenty of reports of such fireballs and Chester investigated whether it could be a meteor or whether there were "any potential decays of space junk that were coming up," he told SPACE.com.

He checked the listing for debris that were expected to enter the lower atmosphere from their decaying orbits around this time period and found that second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched last Thursday was slated to hit during a window that started at 8 p.m. last night.

The Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off Thursday from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch a new crew and American billionaire Charles Simonyi - the world's first two-time space tourist - to the International Space Station. The spaceflyers arrived at the space station on Saturday.

Chester ran a satellite tracking program that showed that the rocket debris should have come down exactly in the area where the fireball was spotted.

"This is just too much of a coincidence to be coincidence," he said.

Chester said that U.S. Space Surveillance Network had not yet confirmed that this was the case, but said that he was "99 and four one-hundredths [percent] convinced that this is what it is."

The descriptions of the boom and streak of light reported by local residents were "entirely consistent with re-entering space junk, especially something this big," Chester said.

Delta airline pilot Bryce Debban reported seeing the streak of light on a flight from Boston to Raleigh-Durham when his plane was about 31,000 feet in the air.

"We saw it streak across the sky and then blow up," Debban told SPACE.com. "It was brighter than the full moon. It lit up the cockpit as if it were daylight."

James Zimbelman of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's Center for Earth and Planetary Sciences said that the explosion being caused by a re-entering rocket was very plausible. It "sounds all too reasonable," he said.

A rocket stage would fragment and explode "just as if it were a meteorite," he said. And the size of the rocket would explain why the explosion was seen over so wide an area.

The Soyuz rockets jettison their second stage after entering orbit in such a way that the second stage will slowly fall back to earth in a few days. But "you can control precisely where these things are going to come down," Chester said.

It's possible that some fragments of the rocket made it to the Earth's surface, but they would likely have a couple of hundreds of miles east of Cape Hatteras, Chester said.

"I don't think anybody will find anything on land," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/mysterious...hhVWthr7sF

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NIGHT LIGHTS A MYSTERY AGAIN

Air Force says Sunday night light show was natural phenomenon

Date published: 4/1/2009

By RUSTY DENNEN

It now appears that Sunday night's celestial light show in the eastern sky along the East Coast came compliments of Mother Nature and not the Russians.

"The bright light that was reported was not the result of any trackable manmade object," Lt. Justin Jessop, spokesman for the 30th Space Wing at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, said yesterday.

On Monday, Geoff Chester, spokesman for the Naval Observatory, told reporters that the lights and sounds in the sky visible around 9:30 p.m. Sunday and reported by hundreds of people, was most likely part of a Russian Soyuz rocket booster.

The Russians launched a Soyuz from Kazakhstan last Thursday, carrying a fresh crew to the International Space Station. Chester did say that it was also possible it was a meteor.

Fredericksburg-area residents were among many in Virginia who reported seeing huge fireballs low in the sky, with blue, red and green hues and causing a thundering sound.

Jessop said Vandenberg tracks over 19,000 manmade objects in space, including rocket boosters or motors that separate from spacecraft on their ascent to orbit.

For example, the space wing is still tracking a tool bag that astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper dropped during a spacewalk from the Space Station in November.

The 20th Space Control Squadron Detachment 1, a tenant command at the Naval Support Facility Dahlgren in King George County, is involved in tracking space objects.

It is a backup space command and control center, and operates nine remote field stations of the Air Force Space Surveillance System.

A spokesman at Dahlgren referred questions to Vandenberg.

http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2009/...009/456099