A pedestrian walks by the Mississippi State Capitol building in Jackson, Mississippi, U.S., on Wednesday, April 8, 2020. The U.S.
is on track for a grim milestone in the coming days -- passing Italy as the world's epicenter of Covid-19 mortality. Pho JACKSON, Miss. - NASA officials believe a fiery meteor is what caused loud booms over southern Mississippi Wednesday morning.
The agency reported more than 30 witnesses from the state, plus Arkansas and Louisiana, reported seeing a bright fireball around 8:03 a.m.
local time. That sighting was then followed up with numerous reports of loud booms heard in Claiborne County, Mississippi, and nearby counties.Meanwhile, at nearly 22,000 miles out in space, NOAA’s Geostationary Lightning Mappers (GLM) onboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) detected multiple bright flashes associated with a bright meteor which was first spotted 54 miles above the Mississippi River near Alcorn, Mississippi.RELATED: SpaceX launches 53 Starlink satellites on rocket used for first private astronaut mission"This is one of the nicer events I have seen in the GLM data," said Bill Cooke, lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.Researchers thought the sighting was a piece of an asteroid as it moved southwest at 55,000 miles per hour.