Unlike most individual lightning flashes, which are shorter than a millisecond, the light signature of bolides lasts slightly longer. The observations occurred during the satellite’s post-launch test phase and were reported in a newly published paper online this week. ![]() In 2017, the Geostationary Lightning Mapper on-board NOAA’s GOES East (GOES-16) satellite, detected several bolides throughout the Western Hemisphere. Now, however, an instrument on-board NOAA’s two newest geostationary weather satellites (GOES-16 and GOES-17) designed to detect a different type of flash – lightning – has also observed these spectacularly bright meteors flying through our atmosphere. ![]() military satellites in geostationary orbit. Until recently, tracking bolides has largely been the work of U.S. While several thousand large meteors enter (and burn up in) Earth’s atmosphere each day, the vast majority of them occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, leaving them undetected. Commonly known as fireballs, these large meteoroids can measure several feet in diameter and appear as bright, or sometimes even brighter, than the full moon. The brightest meteors, called bolides, make quite a flash when they explode in the Earth’s atmosphere. When they enter our atmosphere as meteors, their resistance with the surrounding air creates intense heat, which in most cases vaporizes them to dust long before they reach the ground. These small rock fragments, which come from comets or asteroids orbiting the sun, hurtle through space at speeds reaching 100,000 mph or more. ![]() Meteoroids routinely bombard Earth's atmosphere from outer space.
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