Weather Satellites Caught Unique Look at Russian Meteor

By using weather satellites to reconstruct the trajectory of the meteor that exploded over Russia earlier this year, scientists successfully demonstrated the possibility of using an unexpected resource in tracking similar events.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers note that while rare, large meteors "give sobering testimony to civilization's inherent vulnerability." The fireball that erupted over the Russian city of Chelyabinsnk in February was one such "not-so-subtle reminder."

Steven Miller is a satellite meteorologist at Colorado State University who got the idea for the study while watching the explosion on TV.

"Like so many others, I was watching the late evening news when the first videos from Russia were broadcasted," Miller told Space.com. "I couldn't believe my eyes, and thankfully we had a DVR which allowed me to go back and replay it over and over, stepping through each stage of the entry. I noted the large debris trail left in the sky, and it immediately struck me that one of our many environmental satellites must have captured it."

To test this theory, Miller and his colleagues gathered images taken by an international array of weather satellites and used them to estimate the meteor's speed, angle of entry and trajectory. The results, they found, closely resembled those derived from surface-based technology.

Most exciting for Miller was the fact that one satellite from the US Defense Meteorological Satellite Program happened to capture "what is perhaps the best space-based view of this historical event," he told Space.com.

"We grabbed the data, and at panned-out view did not really see anything at first," Miller recalled. "But then, upon zooming in a bit, an oddly straight cloud feature popped out that did not look like typical meteorological clouds. It turned out to be the meteor trail!"

These findings, the researchers argue in the study, "demonstrate the general ability of Earth-viewing satellites to provide valuable insight on trajectory reconstruction in the more likely scenario of sparse or nonexistent surface observations."