Satellite fireball detection
Satellites designed for other purposes, such as lightning or missile detection, also spot large fireballs from orbit.
Several kinds of satellite record bright flashes in the atmosphere and therefore detect large fireballs. United States government sensors, designed to spot rocket launches and explosions, have released data on hundreds of large fireballs since 1988, including their energy, location and sometimes their speed.
Weather satellites carrying lightning mappers, such as the Geostationary Lightning Mapper on the GOES satellites, launched from 2016, also catch fireballs, because they watch for quick flashes across a whole hemisphere. They have recorded falls over the Americas, sometimes leading to meteorite recoveries.
Satellite data are important because they cover oceans and remote regions where few people live. They show that objects of a metre or more strike our atmosphere roughly every two weeks somewhere on Earth. These observations are a key input for estimating the rate of larger impacts and for testing models of how meteoroids break up.
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