Live on the globe now: 12 tracked
This layer plots fireballs and bolides — meteors bright enough to detonate as airbursts in the upper atmosphere — pinned to the spot on Earth above which each flash peaked. The data comes from NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which compiles detections reported by US Government sensors, supplemented since 2019 by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper instruments on GOES weather satellites. Click any point to inspect the event: peak-brightness time (UTC), latitude and longitude, altitude above the surface, entry velocity, total radiated energy, and the calculated impact energy in kilotons of TNT equivalent. Two things make this feed unlike a live earthquake or lightning map. First, it is not real-time — CNEOS publishes events after the fact, and not every fireball is reported, so think of it as a sparse historical record rather than a tripwire. Second, the energies are genuinely large: most points represent objects that released the equivalent of tens to hundreds of tons of TNT, well above an ordinary shooting star. We display a trailing window of roughly the last 120 days. CNEOS does not independently reanalyze these events, so treat the figures as the reporting sensors provide them. This is one of about 29 live layers you can solo, spin and zoom on the overwatch.earth globe.
Data source: NASA CNEOS
A fireball is a meteor far brighter than the planets; a bolide is one that explodes as an atmospheric airburst. CNEOS lists energetic events detected by US Government sensors, so every point here is a meaningful airburst, not a typical shooting star. Each comes with an impact energy in kilotons of TNT equivalent.
No. NASA CNEOS explicitly states these data are not provided in real time and that not all fireballs are reported. Events appear after they are detected and published, sometimes days later. We refresh from the CNEOS API every few hours, but the underlying feed is a curated historical record, not an instant alert system.
For each fireball we show the peak-brightness time (UTC), location (latitude and longitude beneath the flash), altitude in kilometres, entry velocity in km/s, the total radiated energy, and the total impact energy in kilotons of TNT. Some fields can be blank when the reporting sensors did not capture them.
It comes from NASA JPL's CNEOS fireball database at cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/fireballs, drawing on US Government sensors and GOES satellite lightning mappers. This layer shows roughly the trailing 120 days; CNEOS's full archive of reported events stretches back to 1988.