上空58キロを飛ぶ小天体

1972年に米サウスウェスト上空をカナダへ向かって飛ぶ小天体を、ワイオミングのGrand Teton国立公園の観光客が偶然に撮影した映像。大きさは自動車から家くらいの大きさと推定され、上空58キロメートルの大気圏内を100秒ほど飛び、太陽の引力に引かれて地球の引力圏から離れたそうです。

A particularly interesting fireball was observed moving north over the Rocky Mountains from the U.S. Southwest to Canada on August 10, 1972, and was filmed by a tourist at the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming with an 8-millimeter color movie camera [8] The object was in the range of size from a car to a house and should have ended its life in a Hiroshima-sized blast, but there was never any explosion, much less a crater. Analysis of the trajectory indicated that it never came much lower than 58 kilometers off the ground, and the conclusion was that it had grazed Earth's atmosphere for about 100 seconds, then skipped back out of the atmosphere to return to its orbit around the Sun.
(参考リンク:Impact event)(Wikipedia)