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On Aug. 14, 1992, a meteorite entered the atmosphere over Mbale, Uganda and exploded into hundreds of pieces!
Debris from this meteorite shower was strewn over an area of about 2 by 4 miles, and the biggest piece weighed more than 60 pounds! Scientists estimated that the original meteorite weighed upwards of 2,000 pounds.
Its instruments allow it to peer through fog and smoke to see Earth’s surface at a level of detail that was unprecedented for a nongovernmental spacecraft.
WorldView-3 lifted off on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and has been orbiting the Earth ever since.
A young boy was hit in the head with a smaller meteorite fragment, but thankfully no one was seriously injured or killed by any of the falling space rocks.
In October 2012, a fragment of the Mbale meteorite was put up for sale by Heritage Auctions in New York City.
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Hanneke Weitering is an editor at Space.com with 10 years of experience in science journalism. She has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.
