Meteorite that landed in Cape Cod was a 'lone wolf' from the outer solar system, scientists find
Thanks to a combination of radar, infrasound, dash-cam and security camera footage, astronomers have tracked the bright daytime meteor that fell over Cape Cod Bay in May 2026 back to its origin as a small asteroid perturbed by Jupiter and sent on a comet-like orbit towards Earth.
Key points
- These pressure waves can travel hundreds or thousands of kilometers and were picked up by the Elginfield Infrasound Array (ELFO) in Ontario, Canada, as well as by citizen scientists operating their own Raspberry Shake/Boom pressure sensors, which are build-your-own micro-barometers produced by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
- The existence of the head echo is usually very brief, taking place at 56 miles (90 kilometers () altitude down to about 44 miles (71 kilometers) when the plasma around the meteoroid is dense enough to return a radar echo.
- local time (18:06 UTC) on May 30, 2026 one such bolide was widely witnessed falling out of the sky over coastal Massachusetts, with members of the public also reporting an associated sonic boom that rumbled across the north-eastern coast of the United States.
We are grateful to the citizen scientists whose measurements expanded the coverage and helped locate the event." From the data gathered, the team were able to deduce certain properties about the object that fell to Earth over Massachusetts.
Additional details
- In the case of the 30 May bolide, the trail echo was detected down to an unusually low altitude of 20 miles (32 kilometers), at which point the falling rock fragmented with an explosive force equivalent to 500 tons of TNT, whereas the total impact energy of the bolide was in the region on 1.1 kilotons of TNT.
- Key to these observations were measurements by the Spread Spectrum Interferometric Meteor Observing Network (SIMONe) based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Haystack Observatory.
- The head echo transitions into a 'trail echo', which is produced by a streak of turbulent plasma that is left in the wake of the meteoroid after it has passed through a given part of the atmosphere.
- At this point, four of the Next Generation Weather Radars (NEXRAD) jointly operated by the National Weather Service, the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S.
- The meteoroid that entered the atmosphere was about a meter (approximately three feet) across, and based on how deep it penetrated into the atmosphere before….
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