Some are legendary, like 1783’s Great Meteor, which streaked past England and over continental Europe, or the incorrectly named Great Comet of 1860, which was painted by the Hudson River School artist Frederic Church and inspired a poem by Walt Whitman. The first grazing fireball to be studied by modern science zipped over North America for 101 seconds in 1972.

But few spend this long dipping into the atmosphere. And not one has ever been as well studied. It might have gone unseen if not for the Desert Fireball Network, a set of observatories that span a vast, sparsely populated swath of Australia.

The network’s goal is to fetch meteorites that land in the desert. “We see a lot of things that people don’t see because we put the cameras in places where we can find the rock,” Mr. Shober said. But in this case, there was nothing to retrieve.

His team estimates the rock responsible for the event entered the atmosphere weighing 130 pounds and measuring only about a foot across. But it blazed so brightly for so long because it traveled on a shallow path and moved at a blistering pace of about 10 miles per second. Near its lowest point, still about 36 miles above the surface of the Earth, a chunk broke off and burned up.

By triangulating its trajectory from multiple positions, Mr. Shober traced the fireball back to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, his team reports in a paper that will be published by The Astronomical Journal. As it reached Earth, the planet gave it an extra kick.