Dear Tom,
At 9:20 p.m. June 12, I saw a vivid fireball that lasted five seconds, giving off sparks as it disintegrated. Did you receive any other reports of this?
Bob Ard, DeKalb, Ill.
Dear Bob,
Yours was the only description of that particular event.
Entering the Earth’s atmosphere at speeds as high as 150,000 m.p.h., meteorites glow to incandescence owing to friction with the air.
Dr. Don Yeomans, Senior Research Scientist at the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, heads up their Near-Earth Object Program. He offers this comment, “Basketball-sized objects hit the Earth’s atmosphere on a daily basis, Volkswagen-sized objects every six months or so, and objects capable of megaton detonations about every one thousand or fifteen hundred years.”
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Tom Skilling is chief meteorologist at WGN-TV. His forecasts can be seen Monday through Friday on WGN-TV News at noon and 9 p.m.
WGN-TV meteorologists Steve Kahn, Richard Koeneman and Paul Dailey plus weather producer Bill Snyder contribute to this page.
