When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.The fireball could have scattered meteorites across a populated urban area north of Houston. | Credit: NASA, Google Earth, © JakeFromStateFarmNASA has released a “strewn field” map of where meteorites may have fallen after a rare daytime fireball explosively disintegrated in the skies over Houston on Saturday (March 21) evening — with the force of 26 tons of TNT.Houston residents reported hearing loud booms as pressure waves brought about by the meteor’s demise reached the ground at 5:40 p.m. EDT (21:40 GMT), following its brief but fiery descent.AdvertisementAdvertisementAs the roughly 1-ton (1,000-kilogram) meteor struck the atmosphere, it created a flash of light bright enough to register on lightning mapping instruments aboard NOAA’s GOES satellites, which hold geostationary orbits tens of thousands of miles above Earth’s surface.”Most of the mass of an object like this is reduced to atoms and fine droplets during the fireball and only a few percent of the total mass survives to reach the ground, scattered across a range of meteorite sizes,” according to a post from
