Fireball spotted in Dutch skies; Meteor, not missile, experts say
Many people in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany spotted a fireball in the sky around dusk on Sunday. The Dutch police received many calls, with people reporting everything from a missile to a crashing plane. According to experts, it was a meteor. It’s debris landed in Germany, where it damaged several roofs.
A police spokesperson told NOS that police control rooms throughout the Netherlands received reports of the flying fireball. The observations varied, partly depending on the location. Some people thought it was a rocket, possibly due to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Others reported a comet. In Lelystad, the police received several reports of a plane crash.
Joost Hartman of the Meteor Working Group Netherlands and space expert Rob van den Berg told the broadcaster that the fireball was likely a meteor, a piece of rock or metal from space.
Videos of the fireball are circulating on social media. The videos show an explosion. According to Hartman, that is when the space debris entered the atmosphere. “There are dozens of normal shooting stars every night. You see them on a clear night. Shooting stars light up and fade away after a few seconds,” he told NOS. “If an object the size of a brick, a soccer ball, or a skippy ball flies into the atmosphere at high speed, that piece of debris can break up.”
According to Van den Berg, the exact material can only be identified once it has been found on Earth. “In principle, a meteor is a natural space rock. But you only know that once youth found it. A piece of a crashing satellite shows the same light trail.”
The German police reported that the debris of the meteor landed in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Local media reported damage to roofs in the Hunsrück region, the Eifel Mountains, and Koblenz. As far as is known, no damage occurred in the Netherlands or Belgium.
