A 5,600-Pound Iron Meteorite Just Fell Into Cape Cod Bay

If you were anywhere near New England on the afternoon of May 30, 2026, you may have seen it: a bright fireball crossing the sky at 2:06 p.m. EDT, moving at roughly 42,000 miles per hour. NASA's meteorite tracking program confirmed it as a genuine meteorite fall — and a big one.

The object was estimated at about 5 feet across with a mass of 5.6 metric tons entering the atmosphere, breaking apart in a daytime bolide event over Cape Cod Bay. Researchers who modeled the debris field independently confirmed, using separate data, that this was an iron meteorite fall. Dark-flight modeling estimated that of the total fall mass, roughly 130 kilograms of fragments would be large enough (over 1 gram) to potentially be recovered — though most of the debris field lies underwater in the bay itself, making recovery considerably more difficult than a land fall.

Iron meteorites like this one are fragments of the metallic cores of long-destroyed asteroids — objects that were once molten planetary building blocks, differentiated into a dense iron-nickel core, before a collision billions of years ago shattered the parent body and sent pieces drifting through the solar system until one, eventually, found New England.

Source: NASA Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES), 2026.