HENRY COUNTY, Ga. — NASA confirms a meteor moving nearly 30,000 miles per hour is what brightened the sky above metro Atlanta Thursday evening. Channel 2 received reports of the fireball from Floyd to Henry counties.
Six NASA cameras caught pieces of the event, but the one atop the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville was the only one to capture the meteor's entire path around 6:30 p.m.
"I was driving the car and I saw a streak of light go across the sky, and I thought to myself what in the world is that? It just shot across the sky, just a second maybe. It was very quick," said Sarah Yacovett, who was driving her three kids to a piano recital near Cartersville.
Brighter than a full moon, NASA estimates that a piece of an asteroid weighing at least 150 pounds and just under a foot and a half in diameter entered the Earth's atmosphere at nearly 30,000 miles per hour.
"It went from 30,000 miles per hour to only about 9,000 miles per hour, and that tells us that it probably survived its entry into the atmosphere and maybe pieces survived to the ground," Tellus Science Museum Astronomer David Dundee said.
Tellus confirmed Doppler radar detected up to 10 larger pieces could have made landfall near McDonough, Locust Grove and on the Spalding, Butts and Henry county lines.
So how do you know if you found a meteorite or a regular earth rock? Tellus Science Museum Curator and Geologist Sarah Timm says to first weigh it. A meteorite is heavy and dense.
Keep in mind we have a lot of iron smelting in North Georgia. Unlike iron slag, a meteorite doesn't have air pockets.
The third feature requires a magnet off the refrigerator. "Another very key thing is that 99 percent of meteorites are magnetic," Timm said.
If you found a rock that's excessively heavy, solid and magnetic, then you might've found a meteorite. Bring it to the Tellus Science Museum so someone can confirm it.