To Meyer and Locraft, it seemed that the meteor was at their altitude, about seven miles. But in those few seconds, says Meyer, "we both thought that was our last moment here on Earth."
Paul thought it was a missile." It took them only a few seconds to realize that the bright light, already fading to red, was a meteor. "I thought it was an airplane that had just turned on its landing light before it was going to hit us.
"We went from a resting heart rate to max heart rate in about two seconds," says Meyer. They were at 37,000 feet near the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan when a fireball as bright as the sun appeared in their windscreen, heading away from them on a parallel course. That evening, United Parcel Service pilots Mike Meyer and Paul Locraft were on their way home to Anchorage, Alaska, in an MD-11. Pilot Mark Lavoie likened it to an emergency flare. Novak, a pilot for Spec Engineering of Calgary, who saw it from his altitude of 9,000 feet as a "flaming red trail" ending in an explosion. Among the hundreds who reported seeing the meteor was J.R. On November 20, only a few weeks after the Sudan meteor, another large object fell toward Earth, this time over Saskatchewan, Canada, east of Edmonton. Those that outshine Venus, the brightest planet, are known as fireballs, and some super fireballs are as bright as the sun.įireballs are memorable sights, but not all that rare, not even for pilots.
#Flying fire ball zip
Meteors-the "shooting stars" you're likely to see from your back yard on a moonless night-are particles the size of a grain of sand heating the air and vaporizing as they zip along at up to 40 miles per second. Captain Ron de Poorter and copilot Coen van Uden likened the flashes to artillery fire or distant lightning. Early on the morning of OctoTC3 blazed into the atmosphere, and some 15 minutes later, Kuiper got a call from the airline: Two of its 747 pilots on a course from Johannesburg to Amsterdam reported several bright flashes to the northeast while flying over Chad. Kuiper immediately realized the unique opportunity for pilots flying over eastern Africa to observe the meteor, and notified the Dutch airline KLM, which put out the word. But rocks the size of 2008 TC3 enter the atmosphere every few months without causing harm.Īmong those who took note of the impending strike was Jacob Kuiper, a meteorologist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute whose job it is to inform airlines of hazardous weather and volcanic ash clouds along their routes. Had the object been 10 times larger, there would have been hurried calls to world leaders and a state of emergency. By their calculations, 2008 TC3 would hit northern Sudan within 20 hours-exactly the sort of event the Catalina Sky Survey was set up to warn against. It was discovered on the morning of October 6, 2008, by the Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, Arizona, the current pacesetter in finding near-Earth objects, having identified 565 new ones last year alone.Ĭatalina employees alerted the staff of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who quickly plotted an orbit. Measuring about six feet across (or maybe 12-deduced from brightness, such estimates are rough), the boulder was at the limit of detectability for ground-based telescopes that search for asteroids on a collision course with Earth. The object now remembered as 2008 TC3 had been circling the sun for eons, on an orbit similar to Earth's, its existence unsuspected until the day before it struck.
#Flying fire ball free
Hopefully this explains my thoughts somewhat good as I'm not really that great with testfor and execute, feel free to call me out if what I am saying is bs tho as I am currently unable to test this as I'm not able run mc atm.Most of the time we never find out what hit us. I don't want to use any redstone because that stops working when I go too far away. I'm using command blocks to do so, but I've run into some problems. I'm trying to make an item that, when held, summons a fireball above the player's head.
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