Determination of strewn fields for meteorite falls

Autor: J. Moilanen, Esko Lyytinen, Maria Gritsevich
Přispěvatelé: Faculty of Science, Department of Physics
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
ISSN: 1365-2966
0035-8711
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stab586
Popis: When an object enters the atmosphere it may be detected as a meteor. A bright meteor, called a fireball, may be a sign of a meteorite fall. Instrumentally observed meteorite falls provide unique opportunities to recover and analyse unweathered planetary samples supplemented with the knowledge on the Solar system orbit they had. To recover a meteorite from a fireball event, it is essential that recovery teams can be directed to a well-defined search area. Until recently, simulations showing the realistic mapping of a strewn field were difficult, in particular due to the large number of unknowns not directly retrieved from the fireball observations. These unknowns include the number of fragments and their aerodynamic properties, for which the masses of the fragments need to be assumed in a traditional approach. Here, we describe a new Monte Carlo model, which has already successfully assisted in several meteorite recoveries. The model is the first of its kind as it provides an adequate representation of the processes occurring during the luminous trajectory coupled together with the dark flight. In particular, the model comprises a novel approach to fragmentation modelling that leads to a realistic fragment mass distribution on the ground. We present strewn field simulations for the well-documented Košice and Neuschwanstein meteorite falls, which demonstrate good matches to the observations. We foresee that our model can be used to revise the flux of extra-terrestrial matter onto the Earth, as it provides a possibility of estimating the terminal mass of meteorite fragments reaching the ground. © The Author(s) 2021. This work was supported, in part, by the Academy of Finland project no. 325806 (PlanetS). We acknowledge Hadrien Devillepoix and Morgan Hollis for their supportive and valuable comments that encouraged us to improve this paper by adding the section on the strewn field of the Neuschwanstein meteorite fall. We thank Eleanor Sansom for helping us to proof read this paper and for stimulating discussion. We thank Juraj Tóth for providing additional coordinates of the documented Kosˇice meteorite fragments in addition to those published in Tóth et al. (2015). We thank Dieter Heinlein and Jürgen Oberst for discussing the circumstances of the known Neuschwanstein meteorite finds and difficulties of the ground search. We thank Panu Lahtinen (Finnish Meteorological Institute) and Peter Völger (Swedish Institute of Space Physics) for their help with obtaining the actual atmospheric data for the studied fireball events and valuable discussions. We thank all members of the Finnish Fireball Network and acknowledge Ursa Astronomical Association for the support with the Network coordination. We acknowledge fruitful collaboration with the colleagues at the Ural Federal University in organizing the field trips and prompt meteorite recoveries based on provided strewn field maps. The research at the Ural Federal University was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project nos. 18-08-00074 and 19-05-00028.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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