A space object with an intimidating name—"earthgrazer"—zoomed over Georgia and Alabama this week, offering witnesses a glimpse of something rare, NASA says.

"Earthgrazers" are fireball meteors with a trajectory so shallow that they skim long distances across the upper atmosphere, NASA says.

"Very rarely, they even 'bounce off' the atmosphere and head back out into space," NASA Meteor Watch wrote on Facebook.

The fireball appeared Tuesday, Nov. 9, around 6:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, officials say, and was "detected by three NASA meteor cameras in the region."

It entered the atmosphere "at a very shallow angle—only 5 degrees from the horizontal."

In fact, it was flying for so long that NASA had to recalculate its data to determine how far it traveled across the planet.

"The meteor was first seen at an altitude of 55 miles above the Georgia town of Taylorsville, moving northwest at 38,500 miles per hour," NASA says. Taylorsville is about 55 miles northwest of downtown Atlanta.

"Its path was so long that our automated software could not handle all the data. So we ran another analysis code this morning (Nov.

Seven months after it was launched, the US robotic rover Perseverance successfully landed on Mars on February 18 2021. The landing was part of the mission Mars2020 and was viewed live by millions of people worldwide, reflecting the renewed global interest in space exploration. It was soon followed by China's Tianwen-1, an interplanetary Mars mission consisting of an orbiter, lander and rover called Zhourong.

Perseverance and Zhourong were the fifth and sixth planetary rovers deployed in the last decade. The first one was America's Curiosity which landed on Mars in 2012, followed by China's three Chang'E missions.

In 2019 the Chang'E-4 lander and its Yutu-2 rover were the first human objects landed on the far side of the moon—the side that faces away from the Earth. This marked a pivotal milestone in planetary exploration, of equal importance to the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, when the far side of the moon was seen by humans for the first time.

To analyze the data captured from the Yutu-2 rover, which used ground-penetrating radar (GPR), we developed a tool that could detect in much greater detail the layers beneath the moon's surface than had ever been done before.