1-ton meteor streaks across Texas sky before breaking up in a fireball: NASA
A 1-ton meteor traveling at nearly 35,000 mph caused a fireball and a loud boom over Texas on Saturday as it broke into pieces while entering Earth's atmosphere, according to NASA.
NASA said it began receiving numerous reports of a fiery object streaking through the sky north of Houston on Saturday afternoon. The agency said it is trying to confirm reports that a piece of the meteor penetrated the roof of a house in Cypress Station, Texas, about 27 miles north of Houston.
"It was like a boom!" Sherrie James told ABC station KRTK in Houston of the strange rock-like object that she said caused a hole in her ceiling and a big dent in her floor while she was at home.
"It just scared me to death," James said. "I said, 'Everybody, back out, get out of the room.' I said, 'I don't know what this is, but this might be a meteor.' I said, 'I don't know?' First thing I did was call the fire department."
The NASA’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division (ARES) said it began getting numerous reports about the celestial show around 4:40 p.m. local time on Saturday.
ARES said that before it broke up, the meteoroid measured roughly 3 feet in diameter and weighed about a ton.
"Current data indicates that the meteor became visible at 49 miles above Stagecoach, northwest of Houston," NASA said it posted on social media on Saturday night. "It moved southeast at 35,000 mph, breaking apart 29 miles above Bammel, just west of Cypress Station."
NASA said the fragmentation, which unleashed an energy equivalent of 26 tons of TNT, created a pressure wave that caused the sonic booms heard across the area.
Eyewitnesses reported the event from as far away as the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Austin, according to NASA.
"Most of the mass of an object like this is reduced to atoms and fine droplets during the fireball and only a few percent of the total mass survives to reach the ground, scattered across a range of meteorite sizes," NASA said.
Doppler weather radar, according to NASA, showed meteorites produced by the fragmentation falling between the Houston suburbs of Willowbrook and Northgate Crossing.
No injuries were reported.
The incident came just five days after the meteor measuring nearly 6 feet in diameter and weighing about 7 tons caused a fireball in the sky near the Cleveland, Ohio, area, according to a NASA statement. That meteoroid also caused a loud boom when it broke apart about 50 miles above Lake Erie and while traveling at 39,200 mph, according to NASA.
ABC News' Matthew Glasser, Tristan Maglunog and Alyssa Gregory contributed to this report.
