(PBP) – A long-lasting fireball that broke into several pieces over South Florida this morning could be a piece of space junk forecast to fall to Earth today, said an official with the American Meteor Society. Mike Hankey, the operations manager for AMS, said he is “100 percent sure” the lights were space debris breaking up in the atmosphere. According to the website Satview.org, a piece of space junk was expected to reenter the atmosphere at about 7 a.m. this morning.
“The reentry time difference from estimate to fireball was just four hours and the distance from estimate to actual about 300 km, so this is the likely candidate,” Hankey said. “The reentry estimates are really just educated guess, so they are not exact.” Hankey said he’s still waiting for confirmation that the forecast piece of space junk, labeled CZ-3B R/B, was actually what people saw this morning. More than 20 people in Florida from St. Augustine to Key West reported seeing the fireball on the AMS website. READ MORE
