(meteorobs) Airburst statistics - most recent paper?

Daniel Fischer dfischer at astro.uni-bonn.de
Mon Apr 23 07:14:47 EDT 2012


Media interest in the U.S. westcoast fireball/airburst is still on the increase,
even over here in Germany - which raises the question: how often do airbursts of
this energy occur? At 3.8 kt TNT eq. (what are the error bars?) this one would
have been 2 to 3 times as energetic as the terminal burst of 2008 TC3 that -
according to http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/2008tc3.html - had only a 1-2 kt TNT
equivalent. According to a diagram I obtained from Alan Harris in 2008 - see
http://www.oculum.de/newsletter/astro/000/60/5/65.df3gt.htm#3 (not sure where
and when it was published in the technical literature) a 3-kt impact should
happen roughly once per year: Is that the current thinking? A more detailled
statistical study - esp. one dealing with the low-mass high-frequency part of
the distribution - would be welcome (even more so when it were open access :-).

Daniel


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