Now the exact trajectory of a meteorite, which was discovered in southern Germany last July, has been determined.
The fireball captured by the network of cameras, and the rock that was found
In matters of meteorites, as in matters of art, the origin of the work is very important. But much more is known about the works of Van Gogh or Picasso, for example, than about most meteorites. They originate in space, of course, but beyond that there is little information.
Now the exact trajectory of a meteorite, which was discovered in southern Germany last July, has been determined. The rock, weighing two kilograms, was called "Neuschwanstein" after the castle in Bavaria next to which it was discovered. It is a remnant of a fireball that pierced the atmosphere for five seconds and was recorded by a network of surveillance cameras in central Europe.
According to Dr. Pavel Sporny, coordinator of the European Fireball Network and an astronomer at the Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, this is the fourth time in more than 40 years that a meteorite has been found after surveillance cameras recorded the fireball it produced.
And what's more: according to Spurni, the orbital path in space from which the rock was ejected is the same as the path of the first meteorite discovered this way, in 1959.
"The really unique fact is that these two have the same track," said Spurni. According to him, this is not a coincidence. The two undoubtedly belong to a ring of rocks - most likely particles of one parent asteroid - spinning in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, in the region of the planet Jupiter.
The fire star "Neuschwanstein" was filmed by cameras placed in ten of the network's 30 stations in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Slovakia. At each station, a fixed camera with a very wide lens, and a rotating aperture, is placed that allows the changing speed of the meteor to be determined at different points, while it passes through the sky. Spurni and his colleagues took the seven best photographs and used simple triangulation (calculating an object's position by measuring it from three different points) to calculate the path the fireball traveled through the atmosphere.
They determined that the meteor first appeared at an altitude of 92 meters, northeast of Innsbruck, Austria, and entered the atmosphere at an angle of almost 50 degrees. From there it moved 80 km to the northwest and disappeared at an altitude of 17 meters. Its initial speed was 8 km per second, and during its flight through the atmosphere it slowed to 0.9 km per second. The researchers' findings were reported in the current issue of the journal "Nature."
Based on this information, the researchers determined that the initial weight of the meteorite was 290 kg. They also calculated the path of the "dark flight" of the rock after it stopped burning (its weight at this point was about 14 kg). The meteorite is several hundred meters away from the place where it was supposed to land according to the predictions of the researchers, who assume that additional particles are scattered in the area of the fall.
Jack Drummond, a scientist at the U.S. Air Force Observatory at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, said the Neuschwanstein find is a rare feat in fireball observations. "For about 45 years, the observation networks have been trying to do this," said Drummond. Although these networks tracked many fireballs - the European network records 40 to 50 such objects a year - it turned out to be very difficult to locate the meteorites that created them, and two networks in North America were disbanded due to lack of funding.
New York Times
The Guide to the Cosmos - Dvir Lexicon of Astronomy and Astrophysics - John Gribbin on the Mythos website
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