From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 10:03:46 MDT
spike:
>A leading Australian astronomer believes a large meteor may have hit
>the earth near Adelaide last night. Early yesterday evening, South
>Australian police were inundated with reports of sonic booms, earth
>tremors and sightings of a blue streak in the sky.[...]
>Bryan Boyle [...] But he says regardless of whether it hit the ground,
>it was an extremely rare event and will go down in history. "The great
>fireball of Adelaide 2002," he said. "You would not get many events
>like this happening even over the face of the earth in a year and for
>some people to see it near a populated region, that's even more
>remarkable.
OK, but there was already a major fireball in the middle of Europe
(Bavaria) this year (April 6), that was, an 'extremely rare event',
and it _will_ go down in history. Not only for the ordinary folks who
saw it, but the fact that a group of meteor specialists (mostly from
the Ondrejav Observatory near Prague) undertook an expedition to
locate the meteor fall. They did find it, finally, after collecting
every piece of evidence that they could (including video recordings to
help pinpoint the location). They recovered a meteor fragment from it,
July 14, just the week before the Asteroid Comets and Meteors meeting
late July, and brought it with them to the ACM meeting (so we could
touch it and ooh and ahh about it). You'll probably read about it in
Sky and Telescope- it's a thrilling science story (for geeky people
like us who love thrilling science stories).
Pavel Spurny's report about this 'Bavarian fireball'
Note that the group has since renamed it: "The Meteorite of Neuschwanstein".
http://www.asu.cas.cz/english/new/EN060402.html
Dutch Meteor Society links about this fireball
http://www.xs4all.nl/~dmsweb/fireballs/20020406_fireball.html
An Austrian all-sky camera shows it here:
http://www.astronomie.at/galerie.asp?back=pictures.asp&imgnr=3463
(the fireball is the streak to the left of Jupiter)
Some extra notes from http://www.hohmanntransfer.com/news/0204.htm
<begin quote>
6 April 2002
A fireball known as the Bavarian bolide flew over central Europe on
the night of 6 April 2002. From infrasound, radiometric, and all-sky
camera data, Ondrejov Observatory reports that the object was probably
a stony chondrite meteoroid of about 500 kg. (1,100 pounds) mass, and
some fragments probably survived. The orbit has been calculated and
comes up the same as the Pribram fall almost exactly 43 years earlier,
on 7 April 1959 in what is now the Czech Republic.
Ondrejov Observatory report by Pavel Spurny
Deelen Infrasound Array report by Laslo Evers
A diagram of the Pribram orbit, along with orbits calculated for
several other meteorites, is shown on a page dedicated to one of
them--the Alberta Innisfree fall. Another diagram of the Pribram orbit
can be found on the Tagish Lake Meteorite/Fireball Investigation
consortium study page. How asteroid pieces become meteorites is
explored by the late Paolo Farinella in his "Chaotic Routes Between
the Asteroid Belt and Earth" article in the May 1996 issue of
Meteorite! journal.
August 2002 follow-up: Cosmic Mirror #241 reports that, "The first
meteorite from the 'Bavarian bolide' of April 6 has been recovered."
Several links are given to tell more about this, all in German.
<end quote>
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Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com
Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
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"That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of
empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder."
--Calvin (& Hobbes)
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