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Mar 29 2007

Jet escapes meteor close encounter

SCI-TECH

By Agencies

Space experts say an average of about 50 meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere every day [Nasa]

A Chilean airlner flying to New Zealand has survived a close encounter with a flaming meteor as it flew over the southern Pacific.

Aviation officials said the aircraft came "uncomfortably close" - possibly within a matter of tens of seconds - of being hit by what the pilots described as blazing objects passing close to their flight path.

The pilots said they were able to hear the sonic boom caused by the objects travelling faster than sound above the noise of the aircraft's engines.

They told air traffic controllers they had seen streaks of fire both in front of and behind the Lan Chile Airbus A340.

Initial reports had suggested that jet was narrowly missed by debris from a Russian satellite returning to Earth earlier than scheduled.

But US officials said the objects were most likely parts of a disintegrating meteor.

"The object was reported to be uncomfortably close by the pilot"

Ken Mitchell,
Airways New Zealand

While it is not uncommon for debris to fall into the South Pacific, "it is very uncommon to have a plane in the middle of it,'' said Ken Mitchell, a spokesman for Airways New Zealand.

"The object was reported to be uncomfortably close by the pilot of the aircraft and we've taken the matter very seriously," he said.

"The pilot estimated the debris to be falling as close as five nautical miles (9.26 kilometres) to the aircraft."

Russia's Federal Space Agency issued a statement saying that its cargo ship Progress M-58 had fallen back to Earth according to the timetable it had advised aviation officials about previously.

It said fragments of Progress did not plunge into the South Pacific Ocean east of New Zealand until around 2330 GMT on Tuesday - about 12 hours after the pilots reported sighting the fiery object.

"Unless someone has their times wrong, there appears to be no correlation,'' Nicholas Johnson, orbital debris chief scientist for NASA's Johnson Space Center, told The Associated Press.

Johnson said there are no other reports from the US Space Surveillance Network of other re-entering space junk at the time, so the flaming objects must have been fragments of a meteor.