7-ton meteorite streaks through the U.S. skies at 63,000 km/h: dashcam video

At 8:56 AM on March 17, 2026, an extraordinary phenomenon occurred in the North-East of Ohio: a blinding flash crossed the clear sky, followed moments later by a deep boom that made the windows vibrate in the suburbs south of Cleveland.

Thousands of residents in Ohio and parts of Pennsylvania reported hearing a loud boom, which NASA confirmed was caused by a meteor entering Earth’s atmosphere. Dashcam footage shows a bright fireball streaking across the sky during the morning commute. pic.twitter.com/kt6WF65lR3

— New York Post (@nypost) March 17, 2026

This was a rare "daytime bolide", a small asteroid that, entering the atmosphere at supersonic speed, provided a bright and acoustic display seen in over a dozen U.S. states and in Canada.

According to official data from NASA, released in the "Skyfalls" registry, the object measured about 1.8 meters in diameter and had an estimated mass of 7 tons.

It was first detected at 80 kilometers altitude above Lake Erie, near the beaches of Lorain, before traveling over 55 kilometers in the upper atmosphere heading east-southeast, before finally disintegrating around 49 kilometers high above Valley City, north of Medina County.

The entry speed was calculated at about 17.5 km/s (equivalent to 63,000 km/h). In the early hours following, preliminary estimates indicated an even higher value (72,000 km/h), later corrected through integration of eyewitness accounts and satellite measurements.

The energy released during the fragmentation at altitude was estimated at around 250 tons of TNT, classifying the episode among the most "robust" recorded recently in the United States.

The peculiarity of the event lies in its visibility in broad daylight. The American Meteor Society notes that for a bright trail to stand out against sunlight, the celestial body must be at least the size of a beach volleyball.

Not just light, however: crossing the atmosphere at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour, the asteroid abruptly compressed the column of air in front of it, generating a powerful sonic boom, a true "earthquake in the air" that caused the deafening roar heard by residents, without consequences for things or people.

Confirming the exceptional nature of the phenomenon were not only the viral videos and the school bus security cameras: the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) aboard the GOES-19 satellite from NOAA recorded an anomalous flash coinciding with the sound wave, definitively confirming the spatial origin of the event and cooling down the hotlines of the National Weather Service of Cleveland.

While it released a considerable amount of energy and researchers believe that the fall of fragments is likely south of the break area, in Medina County, the Ohio incident remains far from the destructive levels of historical cases like Chelyabinsk (2013).