[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]
(meteorobs) Reentering debris
My family observed what was apparently reentering debris in the Mojave
desert in 1960 or so. A very bright white "shooting star" came down not
too far away (as evidenced by the uniformed infantrymen out nosing
around all the back roads the next morning). The object was initially
moving very fast but seemed to slow (loss of relative lateral trajectory
due to drag degradation, yielding a more vertical path?) and grow
brighter, with a pronouned "head" approx. 2 mm diameter and white
incandescent tail approximately five times that long. There was no
residual "glow" along the path and no sound.
My cousin may have found the location of its impact alomst twenty miles
away a couple years later. I went there on his second visit. There was a
shallow depression approx. ten feet across, with charred joshua trees on
its perimeter and none uprooted. (Natural depression or eroded?). There
were many "splatters" of what seemed to have been a metal akin to or
largely composed of aluminum (dull silver coat, scratched to reveal
silver).
It differed from the many "shooting stars" we saw over the years in its
brilliance, and the way it did not dull before it disappeared, probably
due to combustion of the component metals. Check spectrographic
absorption lines of your bolides for unmeteroic materials (light metals
and plastics).
Follow-Ups: