UPDATE: After hearing from several experts, this fireball was likely NOT a re-entering rocket body. Bob Christy from Zarya.info confirmed that the two videos were reportedly made around 20:00 – 21:00 UTC, and according to SpaceTrack, the Centaur re-entered about 19 hours earlier at 01:23 UTC. Additionally, the re-entry ground track did not cross Brazil at a correlating time. Dr. Marco Langbroek from SatTrackCam concurred there is no chance this was a Centaur rocket. “Looking at the videos, to me it looks like a very slow, grazing meteor.”
We recently posted a video of a huge meteor streaking over the skies of Brazil. It turns out this wasn’t your average, ordinary, everyday meteor. It was actually a Centaur rocket body re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, according to fellow NASA Solar System Ambassador Eddie Irizarry. “An amazing video that shows a fireball lasting more than 30 seconds captured the reentry of a Centaur rocket body that was launched on 1985,” said Irizarry in an email, reporting for the Sociedad de AstronomÃa del Caribe, the Puerto Rican Astronomy Society. “The object was seen from southeast Brazil by hundreds of people on April 20, 2012 and on the same date, Intelsat 5A12’s rocket body was about to reenter Earth’s atmosphere, passing exactly over the ground track from which some people were able to capture amazing images,” reported Irizarry.
There’s a second video below, as well as a map of the area the fireball was seen.
Thanks to Eddie for sharing his insight.
I don’t believe on Centaur reentry because its trajectory was west to east and the fireball was south to north.
Another Roswell?
And there were 20 hours between the two events. Centaur reentry was predicted to 03h local time and fireball was 23h local time.
Actually exist three videos of the passage of the fireball:
Campos dos Goytacazes ( state of Rio de Janeiro):
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yNR118wbmg
Belo Horizonte ( state of Minas Gerais):
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4aHh0ibJik
Vitória ( state of Espirito Santo):
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqpp0YAA-_U
Just below the estimated trajectory based on reports obtained and videos. Some important detail to take account is that the fireball was seen almost at the zenith in the cities of Governador Valadares and Caratinga (marked in red) in the state of Minas Gerais, and when the fireball was seen in Belo Horizonte it crossed towards Southeast-East-Northeast but when viewed from the cities of Campos dos Goytacazes and Victoria the fireball crossed towards Southwest-West-Northwest (both around 30-45 degrees of altitude), ie, the inverse:
– http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/1927/clipboard04w.png
In gray are some other cities (although exist many others reports of many others cities in this trajectory).
So I agree with mr. Langbroek and mr. Agustoni.
Carlos Bella
How lucky that we live in an age of ubiquitous video-capturing!