(Richard Atkinson)

By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

once-in-a-lifetime

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Feb 22, 2021 | 4:41 PM

If you were lucky enough to be looking north at approximately 6:23 a.m. Mountain Time on Monday morning, you likely witnessed something you’ll never see again.

So says Dr. Alan Hildebrand, Planetary Scientist, and Associate Profession at the University of Calgary’s Department of Geoscience, of a bright meteor that streaked through the Alberta sky.

In 2017, Hildebrand and a graduate student recovered a meteorite in the Kootenay Lake area of British Columbia. Other past work of his includes research into what’s known as the Chicxulub asteroid which is said to have caused the extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period.

Hildebrand is also involved in Canada’s contribution to NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex asteroid study and sample-return mission.

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“It was very fast. I was really surprised at that; the duration was only about two seconds, and it was really bright as far as these things go,” says Hildebrand on Monday’s atmospheric occurrence. “In Cochrane, it was big enough to cast shadows, and that’s hundreds of kilometres from where it was. It looks like it was a natural event of asteroidal rock entering the Earth’s atmosphere.”

That is to say what fell towards Earth was a piece chipped from an asteroid.

The meteor’s approximate location was likely around 100 kilometres north of Edmonton, Hildebrand estimates. Its exact trajectory will be easier to triangulate the more video footage is submitted.

Hildebrand told rdnewsNOW that as of early Monday afternoon, more than 100 submissions had already been made to the American Meteor Society website. The act of locating rocks that do survive the fall from space has been made much easier over the last decade in particular, he adds, because of the prevalency and improvement of digital and phone cameras.

“The average velocity of a fireball coming to the Earth is 20 km/second. The fastest ever recorded where something’s survived and been recovered on the ground is 26 or 27 km/second,” he shares. “That’s not to say you can’t get anything from a faster fireball, and they’re known to reach up to 40 km/second, but recovery from one of those just hasn’t happened yet.”

Essentially, if it’s too fast, it’ll burn up before reaching Earth’s surface.

“It looked like it was blue, which indicates it was indeed moving quickly, and that it had magnesium inside it,” explains Jason Zackowski, host of the Science Pawdcast and local chemistry teacher. “Slower moving fireballs that are red are generally turning the gasses around them into plasma, but the blue is magnesium, so that means wherever it came from, the asteroid it was part of had metal inside it.”

For Hildebrand, the fireball is perhaps the fastest and brightest he’s seen in his 27-years studying them.

“Everyone who saw or recorded the meteor on Monday morning, you’re very lucky to have done so,” he says. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

While there may be a few teams getting to work on analyzing everything there is to know about the meteor, Hildebrand encourages anyone who has footage to submit it, and he’d especially like to speak with anyone who saw it go right overhead or heard it make a boom sound, which would mean it broke the sound barrier.