Large Fireball over Greenland

A Tweet from the Director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, Hans Kristensen, on August 1, 2018 at 5:14 PM Washington D.C. time claimed that a, “Meteor explodes with 2.1 kilotons force 43 km above missile early warning radar at Thule Air Base (Ed. Greenland).”

Meteor explodes with 2.1 kilotons force 43 km above missile early warning radar at Thule Air Base. https://t.co/qGvhRDXyfK
HT @Casillic

We’re still here, so they correctly concluded it was not a Russian first strike. There are nearly 2,000 nukes on alert, ready to launch. pic.twitter.com/q01oJfRUp4

— Hans Kristensen (@nukestrat) August, 1 2018

Since then, the event has been confirmed by the JPL Center for NEO Studies (CNEOS) who computes high-precision orbits for Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) in support of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed “an object of unspecified size travelling at 24.4km/s struck earth in Greenland, just 43km (~28 miles) north of an early missile warning Thule Air Base on the 25th of July, 2018”. There was no public warning from the US government about the incident.

Tags: fireball greenland

Vincent Perlerin

Vincent Perlerin, PhD used to be a researcher in Computational Linguistics. He is now a software developer, a web designer, a community manager, an illustrator and many other things. He is working on the American Meteor Society under the supervision of Mike Hankey. Vincent is the lead developer of all the AMS projects. He's also the lead developer of the International Meteor Organization Website and the IMO online Databases management system.