A Meteor Burned Up 29 Miles Above Midtown Manhattan, NASA Says

A loud boom heard across parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island sparked concern and alarm Tuesday morning, leaving officials across New York and New Jersey scrambling to identify the cause.

By the afternoon, NASA had confirmed a meteor traveling at around 34,000 miles per hour burned up just before noon about 29 miles above Midtown Manhattan, the agency posted on Facebook.

The so-called daylight fireball was first sighted over New York Harbor when it was about 49 miles above land and traveled above the Statue of Liberty, the agency wrote in the Facebook post.

NASA said reports of possible military activity in the area could explain the shaking and sounds that residents of the tri-state area witnessed.

Aries Dela Cruz, a spokesperson for the city’s Office of Emergency Management, said the agency  spent the day reaching out to police departments in the surrounding areas where the sound was heard, while the NYPD fielded concerned calls.

“No one from the federal government reached out to us,” he said. NASA didn’t immediately return a request for comment from THE CITY.

But in a subsequent Facebook statement released Tuesday evening, the agency said they only track asteroids large enough to do harm to people on earth.

“We do not (actually cannot) track things this small at significant distances from the Earth, so the only time we know about them is when they hit the atmosphere and generate a meteor or a fireball,” the agency wrote.

‘Size of a Beach Ball’

Robert Lunsford, the fireball report coordinator at the American Meteor Society, said that based on the reports they received, they suspect Tuesday’s fireball was “probably about the size of a beach ball.”

Even smaller meteors around the size of a softball can create loud sonic booms while crashing through the earth’s atmosphere at around ten miles per second, he said.

While the sounds can be jarring, the actual risk meteors pose is limited, Lunsford said. Even if tiny shards of the meteor had made it to Earth, which NASA said they did not on Tuesday, “it may have put a dent in somebody’s car. It’s like someone is throwing a stone across a street.”

“I wouldn’t worry and buy a helmet when you go outside,” he said.

Anyone excited by Tuesday’s celestial encounter can expect even more during the Perseids meteor shower, where peak activity is expected to take place on the evenings of August 11 and 12.

After the moon sets at midnight, “you should see quite a few bright meteors and maybe even a fireball or two,” Lunsford said.

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