(meteorobs) Very slow meteor 2010 Oct 29 01:52:07 UT from Italy,

Šegon Damir damir.segon at pu.htnet.hr
Wed Nov 3 16:14:27 EDT 2010


Hello!
Sorry for being slow in replying at this topic, here are some details I can forward at the moment.

At least four Croatian Meteor Network cameras captured this fireball (still waiting for observations from one station), and our results confirm what Esko stated. Since this meteor was really slow one, we can't process these observations in the way we ussualy do, and all detections (apart the very begining and end) are made moreless manualy in the way I explained on this year's IMC at Armagh. This is why it takes much, much more time considering meteor duration of more than 10sec. 

Preliminary results from two station show that entrance velocity was arround 18km/s, at begining height of a bit more than 87km (probably just few km more). Meteoroid went down to 28.3km, with terminal velocity of about 3.5km/s. I'm saying "arround", "about", "some"... because these are preliminary results, without taking in calculus all trajectory points and just from two stations. But at the end point of its trajectory, meteor (or should I say meteorite at this point) was only 40km from nearest camera, so I guess margin of error won't be too large, let's say no more than 0.5km in end height and certainly less than 0.5km/s in terminal velocity.

Images from this camera clearly show TWO pieces, for which we believe are meteorites fall to city of Pula, Croatia. Acording to our calculus (based on Ceplecha, 1987), we estimated their mass to be "somewhere about" 0.35 and 0.2 kg. Since touchdown zone calculated indicates town of +50.000 habitatnts, we didn't wait and today there was an aricle in local newspaper and radio news about the meteorites, hoping that someone will find (at least one of) them...

Still waiting data on high altitude winds, then we will define landing zone more preciselly and go search for meteorite in more organized way.  In the meantime, we'll prepare web page for this event separately (images and videos), and put the link on this group asap.

Observations from Italy, detailed for each frame would be usefull for better trajcetory and orbit determination, and we would be very gratefull if available :O)

Give us some time to calm our heartbeats down, and we will let you know the details...
Damir Šegon
Croatian Meteor Network


More information about the Meteorobs mailing list