Cape Cod bolide traced to a Jupiter-perturbed asteroid orbit

Only three recorded bolides worldwide had greater impact energy during 2025, making this a rare high-energy event. Four Next Generation Weather Radar, or NEXRAD, stations then tracked chunks of rock falling into the bay as meteorites. The National Weather Service, Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Air Force jointly operate those radars.

Infrasound, pressure waves below the range of human hearing, registered the hypervelocity fall and breakup. Such waves can travel hundreds or thousands of kilometers. Detections came from the Elginfield Infrasound Array, or ELFO, in Ontario, Canada, and citizen-operated Raspberry Shake/Boom sensors, build-your-own micro-barometers (small pressure-measuring devices) produced by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Six citizen-operated sensors jointly constrained the arrival direction. Five other single-station detections and ELFO supplied the signal periods used to estimate energy release. Vierinen credited the volunteers, saying their measurements expanded the coverage and helped locate the event.

The combined data indicated that the meteoroid was about one meter, or three feet, across. The depth it reached before fragmenting suggested a relatively solid body. The researchers said it was possibly rich in iron.

Where did the meteoroid come from?

Vierinen summarized the orbital result with a direct caveat: “We cannot determine its exact history, but we found no association with any known meteor shower.” The backward extrapolation instead produced a comet-like, elongated orbit around the Sun, with its aphelion (its farthest point from the Sun) close to Jupiter’s orbit.

Objects on such paths are called Jupiter-family comets because Jupiter’s gravitational influence governs their orbits, but this meteoroid was not a comet. Previous research has shown that Jupiter can pull small asteroids from the main asteroid belt, the region between Mars and Jupiter, onto such orbits.

Team member Marc Fries said a close pass by the gas giant may have flung the rock onto its recent Earth-crossing path. He also argued that this transfer mechanism has slowly depleted the asteroid belt over the solar system’s long history.

Why does the meteoroid matter?

Meter-scale meteoroids occupy an observational gap. Larger asteroids are easier to detect from Earth, while pebble-sized objects fall often enough to appear routinely as shooting stars. Meter-scale bodies do not fall that frequently and remain difficult to detect while in space, leaving their population and arrival frequency poorly constrained.

Each recorded bolide therefore adds to estimates of impact frequency, energy, location and source orbit. Fries said measurements of total power, location and original orbit are especially valuable because these larger meteoroids and asteroids are the ones encountered least often. The Cape Cod case supplies one of the few such multi-instrument records.

The fall over a populated coast was fortunate. Global ground stations and satellites can usually narrow a meteor’s path even over uninhabited terrain, but radar yields more accurate geometry. Meteor-radar coverage remains sparse. SIMONe and similar systems are expanding it, although only a handful of sites currently have the sensitivity needed to detect comparable head echoes.

The Cape Cod bolide was much smaller than the roughly 18-meter-wide asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk in 2013 with an estimated 400 to 500 kilotons of TNT equivalent. The comparison matters because tracing meter-scale objects back to their orbits could help identify previously unknown groups of potentially hazardous impactors.

The team’s paper remains a preprint, a manuscript posted for review before journal publication, on arXiv and has not yet appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. Even so, the observations provide a coherent reconstruction of a solid, roughly meter-sized asteroid whose Jupiter-perturbed path brought it over a populated coast and whose breakup left radar, acoustic, visual and citizen-sensor records.

Until global meteor-radar coverage closes the gap, each well-instrumented fall remains a rare and valuable test of where such bodies come from.