NASA and the SETI Institute are asking the public to check their video surveillance camera footage from Wednesday night around 7:44 p.m. PDT for a meteor that lit the sky over the San Francisco Bay Area.
Peter Jenniskens of the NASA Ames Research Center reported that a small asteroid exploded over the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday, October 17th. The explosion shook houses with its sonic boom and might have shattered and scattered pieces when it hit the ground.
The public videos can help researchers study how the meteor broke apart during descent. Jenniskens triangulated data from a pair of meteor surveillance cameras located at the San Mateo College Observatory and Sunnyvale to determine the meteor's trajectory (shown in black on the map).
"The asteroid entered at a slow speed of 14 km/s. There's a good chance that a fairly large fraction of this rock survived and fell somewhere around the North Bay," say Jenniskens. "Much more accurate results will follow from a comprehensive study of the video records. Now, we hope that someone recovers a meteorite on the ground."
To report video and photographic records, please visit http://cams.seti.org.
The meteor was not part of the Orionid Meteor Shower.