Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli, who is currently on board the International Space Station, has published a video of a meteoroid entering our planet's dense atmosphere over the Atlantic Ocean.
He tweeted that he was lucky to be able to film the celestial object, which he said was moving toward Earth at a tremendous speed.
The space.com website suggested that the fireball could have belonged either to the Taurid or the Leonid meteor shower, which peaked shortly after Nespoli made the video on November 5.
We see many meteors from the @Space_Station but I was never able to get one on camera… this time I got lucky and filmed a #fireball, a very bright and fast meteoroid falling to #Earth at about 40km/s! Can you spot it? #VITAmission https://t.co/gbMuhPqbL8 pic.twitter.com/YyZtUc22Oj
— Paolo Nespoli (@astro_paolo) 16 ноября 2017 г.
The website quoted Detlef Koschny, co-manager of the near-Earth object (NEO) segment of the European Space Agency (ESA)'s Space Situational Awareness program, as saying that it "indeed looks like a bright meteor, or fireball."
And here a closer look! Make a wish… I already did 😉 // E qui visto da più vicino! Esprimete un desiderio… Io l'ho già fatto 😉 #VITAmission pic.twitter.com/H0q5f8hUG9
— Paolo Nespoli (@astro_paolo) 16 ноября 2017 г.
At the same time, Koschny did not exclude that the object could be "a re-entering piece of orbiting space debris."
According to Rudiger Jehn, another co-manager of ESA's NEO program, the object's speed was "twice as fast as a typical meteor."
