Mt. Vernon, Texas, USA
1 min read
Mount Vernon, Texas, USA – July 25, 2021, 8:57 PM local time, hundreds of people across Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, witnessed a meteor fireball, heading
The direction of travel of the meteoroid, relative to the ground, in clockwise degrees from North. The terms "heading" and "bearing" may be used interchangeably for projectile motion.... northeast and ending in a flash above the town of Mt. Vernon, in east Texas.
This was a relatively small event, but it is likely that some fragments
Typically, meteoroids breaks apart during flight through the atmosphere. Much of the material evaporates in a process called ablation, leaving only small stones to find. Occaisionally, large meteor events can... reached the ground. Refer to the sections below for details and maps, which you can download to Google Earth.
Video and News
Several videos of the event were captured from various locations across Southern Ontario. NASA cameras also captured this event on a network of calibrated cameras, which were used to calculate the trajectory (NASA videos not shown here).
Search Efforts
This was a small event, but meteorite hunters were quick to descend on the area and begin the search, within 24 hours of atmospheric entry.
You have the best chance of finding fragments in the 10 to 100 gram range. We would recommend searching the southwest end of the strewnfield
The geographic area where meteorites landed, from a specific meteor event. The strewn field size and shape are affected by the size of the event, the slope of the meteor,... first.
If you would like to search for for meteorites from this or future events in this region, please join the Facebook group:
Join the Midwest USA Facebook Group
StrewnLAB Search Area
A trajectory has been estimated from the videos above, and this data has been run through the StrewnLAB software to predict a search area. Please download and review the Google Earth files below for detailed maps of the search area.
Weather Data
The weather data below is sourced from weather balloons, and publicly available via NOAA’s Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA). This data is downloaded and post-processed by the StrewnLAB algorithm, to account for changing weather patterns and weather balloon drift. The plots have altitude on the y-axis, in kilometers above sea level. The wind speed below 10km has large effect on the drift of meteorites.
My name is Jim Goodall, and I am an automotive controls engineer in Michigan, but my passion is physics. I started this website as a hobby, to support the global network of meteorite hunters.
Feel free to contact me, if you have any questions about the products on this website. Jim Goodall | Hartland, Michigan, USA | james.a.goodall@gmail.com | +1 586 709 5888