Daytime fireball stuns Georgians as meteor leaves rare space debris

"It felt like an earthquake or a big bomb going off.” 911 lines in Newton County lit up with anxious callers on June 26, wondering what happened when a massive boom and rattling disrupted what had seemed like a normal afternoon in metro Atlanta. What many didn’t know at the time was that Georgians had spotted a meteor traveling southwest toward Henry County at 30,000 mph. It then unleashed “an energy of about 20 tons of TNT,” according to Bill Cooke, the lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. A piece of the meteorite even ripped through one house, creating a dent in the homeowner's floor. NASA has confirmed that the object was a rare daytime fireball, or a bolide, that had entered Earth's atmosphere and that multiple Doppler weather radars detected the signatures of meteorites falling to the ground. Credits: AJC | Covington-Newton 911 | Henry County 911 | Anna Sparks | Josh Grant | American Meteor Society | Brannon H | David and Anita Roche | NASA | NEXLAB/College of DuPage | NOAA | Henry County Emergency Management | Alicia Gray Loughner