Earth-grazer above The Netherlands on September 22nd, 2020

126 visual reports from 5 countries

The IMO received over 126 reports so far about a fireball event that occurred over The Netherlands on September 22th, 2020 around 03:53 Universal Time. The IMO event #2020-5282 was mainly seen from the Netherlands but we also received reports from UK, Germany, Denmark and Belgium.

The majority of the eyewitnesses reported a very long bright and slow meteor. And it was pretty slow indeed…

Based on Denis Vida, postdoctoral associate at the University of Western Ontario and member of the Global Meteor Network team, the meteoroid entered the atmosphere at 34.1 km/s, reached the lowest altitude of ~91 km - far below any orbiting satellites and far below the ISS - and bounced back into space.

Earth-grazer from where?

Many meteoroids disintegrate in our atmosphere, or slow down and crash into the soil to become meteorites. But after its light show, this one kept going, departing our planet with a celestial “thanks, but no thanks.” An Earth-grazing meteor is a rarely measured kind of meteor caused by a meteoroid that collides with the Earth but survives the collision by passing through, and exiting, the atmosphere. Below is a graph shared by Marco Langbroek from the Leiden University. This graphs represents the altitude of the meteor versus the geographic longitude of its position.

At least two teams computed the orbital elements of the meteoroid. Below are Marco Langbroek's provisional results:

Provisional radiant:

Below are Denis Vida's provisional results shared on Twitter:

Denis Vida stated that the meteoroid had a Jupiter-family orbit but Parent body search found no conclusive hits.