The bright, fiery object seen and heard across Texas on Saturday afternoon was a one-ton meteor, NASA confirmed.
A map posted by the agency indicates the meteor most likely broke apart over the Houston area, first spotted northwest of Houston around 4:40 p.m. traveling southwest at 35,000 miles per hour. NASA estimates it was around three feet in diameter before fracturing and released the same amount of energy as 26 tons of TNT.
A woman who lives near Cypress Station told local media that her family heard the meteor before discovering a piece of it had crashed through the roof of their home.
“’What was that? What is that?’” Sherrie James recalled saying. “Because it was so loud. It was like a boom.”
“So, I come out here and look. There’s a hole in the ceiling, big dent in the floor, another little piece in the ceiling, and a big rock on the floor, and it just scared me to death,” James said. “I said, ‘Everybody, back out, get out of the room.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what this is, but this might be a meteor.’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ First thing I did was call the fire department.”
While the fragment was roughly the size of a baseball, James reports it felt heavier. It was also “all black.”
“It just looked like a rock, and ain’t no rocks got no business falling out of the sky,” James said.
Saturday’s event prompted over 170 reports to the American Meteor Society from south-central and southeastern Texas — including Houston, Katy, College Station, San Antonio and Austin.
Just four days before the Texas event, a larger meteor was seen across at least 10 states before landing in northeast Ohio. NASA estimates the meteor, which caused a loud, booming sound near Cleveland, was about six feet in diameter and weighed roughly seven tons. Traveling at 45,000 miles per hour, it released energy equivalent to 250 tons on TNT.
While several meteor fragments have been found in Medina County, there have been no reports of damage to homes.
In February, while speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Phoenix, planetary defense officer Kelly Fast warned that thousands of near-Earth asteroids capable of destroying a city have yet to be detected — and humanity currently has limited protection against them.
Fast said that small asteroids strike Earth frequently, so they’re not a major concern. She added that scientists are also less worried about the massive, movie-style asteroids because their locations are already known. But the “in-between” ones — that’s “what keeps [her] up at night.”
“It’s estimated there are about 25,000 of those, and we’re only about 40 percent of the way through,” Fast said. “It takes time to find them, even with the best telescopes.”