SUMMARY

SUMMARY

This event was a bright daytime bolide, potentially bright enough to be classified as a superbolide. The NASA Meteoroid Environment Office estimates the size of this object as 1m in diameter moving at 13 km/s (29,000 mph). Sonic booms were widely reported along the ground track of the fireball, which traveled from NE to SW towards the fall site.

Signatures of falling meteorites are present in data from eight radars. Seven are WSD-88D radars from the NOAA NEXRAD network, as well as the TDWR airport weather radar at Atlanta Hartsfield airport. These data provide a detailed view of the meteorites falling in Blacksville, GA.

This is a relatively high-mass fall with many meteorites on the ground. Winds at the time of the fall included a narrow band moving at ~150 mph towards the west. This together with the bolide's NE to SW ground track combined to produce a relatively wide but short strewn field. Larger meteorites were pushed westward by wind but their higher mass produced relatively short-lived, direct paths to the ground. Smaller meteorites took longer to fall and were moved westward for that time period, truncating the meteorite fall and causing a range of sizes to fall within a smaller area than is typical. Meteorites of different masses are probably intermixed on the ground.

This event was seen by the Geostationary Lighting Mapper (GLM) sensors on multiple NOAA GOES satellites. The bolide is remarkably bright as recorded by these sensors.

Several meteorite finds have been reported on social media, suggesting there are many meteorites to find from this event.

UPDATE (15 Aug 2025): At this point dozens of meteorites have been recovered from this event. I have changed the name here from Blacksville to McDonough, the name used for the formal submission to the Meteoritical Society.