While meteors bombard Earth daily, most streak across the sky only briefly before burning up. But on October 3 of last year, a meteor apparently cut into and then out of Earth’s atmosphere, circled the globe, and crashed to Earth 100 minutes later.
Most observers thought they had witnessed the fiery passage of two separate meteors that night--one burning through the sky over Las Cruces, New Mexico, and another that broke apart over the Sierra Nevada in California. But ucla geochemist John Wasson and physicist Mark Boslough of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque reconstructed the trajectory of the events and say that a single meteor is the most likely explanation.
The meteor, they say, after passing above Las Cruces, streaked north and east until it faded out of view near Amarillo, Texas. Wasson and Boslough believe the meteor passed through the upper atmosphere and into space somewhere over Texas or ...
