Sightings of a fireball streaking down from the sky were reported by eyewitnesses in several south-eastern US states on the afternoon of 26 June.

The American Meteor Society’s has logged at least 142 reports about the fireball event from observers in multiple states such as Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The National Weather Service office in Charleston, South Carolina, that “satellite-based lightning detection” showed a streak in the sky over the border between North Carolina and Virginia between 11.51 and 11.56am Eastern Daylight Time.

A dashcam video from a driver in upstate South Carolina the fiery object plummeting from the sky before disappearing behind a forested area adjacent to the highway. Another car driving south-west of Columbia, South Carolina, also captured of the falling object.

“This was clearly a natural rock coming down and not artificial space debris,” says , an astronomer who tracks space launches.

VIDEO | This was just sent to me taken from a dash camera on I-85 SB in Upstate South Carolina

— Cody Alcorn (@CodyAlcorn)

It may have been what’s known as a fireball event, where a bright meteor explodes and breaks apart as it falls through Earth’s atmosphere, said at the American Meteor Society in an with WXIA-TV in Georgia.

Meteorologist Chris Jackson on social media that local fire departments were responding to reports of “fireballs falling out of the sky” but that the emergency responders had not found anything on the ground as of early afternoon.

There are currently no major meteor showers and visible from Earth. The next major meteor shower event involves the Southern delta Aquariids starting next month.

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Six Martian meteorites have been traced back to the craters they were ejected from on Mars millions of years ago. Finding the original sources of these alien rocks will allow us to place them in context, yielding insights about the history of the Red Planet.

“Being able to identify the impact launch sites for any Martian meteorites has been a challenging goal for a long time,” says at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who wasn’t involved in this work. “There have been numerous published attempts before, but none have been very convincing until now.”

When a rock smashes into Mars or another planet, it causes a spray of debris, some of which can float away through space and eventually hit Earth as a meteorite. at Curtin University in Australia and his colleagues used a sophisticated model that matches what we know about the ages of the millions of Martian craters and of the six meteorites that were chipped off the planet’s surface.

“On Mars, you’ve got about 80,000 craters larger than 3 kilometres, so about 80,000 craters that might be the source of these meteorites,” says Lagain. The researchers’ model narrowed this down to about 20 possible sources. Then, they studied the structure of the rocks to find out how much force they had been suddenly subjected to when they were blasted into space, feeding that into another model of the craters themselves. This led them to the original sources of the meteorites and how deep they were probably buried before the impacts that sent them to Earth.

The meteorites are all igneous rocks, meaning they are pieces of solidified lava. at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa says that while there are some questions about whether the properties of the lava flows in these craters completely match the meteorites, if these craters are truly the sources of the rocks, we can learn a great deal about Martian volcanic activity from them.

In particular, two of the meteorites that seem to have come from the same crater imply that the area was volcanically active for longer than was previously thought to be likely. “We will have to rethink what we believe to be the internal ‘plumbing system’ of volcanoes on Mars and how they can stay molten for these extended periods of time,” says Mouginis-Mark.

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There are only about 200 known Martian meteorites on Earth and they are the only Mars rocks that researchers can examine in detail. NASA’s planned mission to bring back samples directly from Mars is facing serious issues that , so these rocks might be our only chance to study Martian material in state-of-the-art laboratories for a long time. “Here, we’ve got six Martian meteorites coming from five places, so it’s like five sample return missions that you get for free,” says Lagain. Studying these samples further could not only teach us about the evolution of Mars, but also help guide future exploration to the most scientifically interesting spots on the surface.

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