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Re: (meteorobs) The Vitim bolide

Dear Steven, and All,

My replies are below, inside your text.

>I have some questions about the Vitim fireball.
>
>- Andrei mentions in his notes on the press conference the discovery of a
>"forest-fall 6 by 10 km with a tree-burn in the center." The AFP press
>report states "Over an area of 100 square kilometres (40 square miles)
trees
>were smashed in a pattern characteristic of very powerful blast effects"
and
>"about 20 craters, up to 20 metres (nearly 70 feet) in diameter." In the
>picture nr. 5 I only see just one (?) charred-tree spot, measuring about
100
>metres in diameter, with no visible crater and no damage done to the trees
>standing outside this perimeter (except for a probable entry path to the
>right of the picture). Should I interpret this as an area of 100 sq. km in
>which several smaller impact areas were found? Or am I misunderstanding
>something?

Unfortunately, I must say that I don't know.  As I understand from
Chernobrov words,  he states that so-called the "impact place" (with small
craters) is farther along the trajectory, than the "explosion" (forest-fall)
one.  I don't want to comment this interpretation.

Also as I understand, there are several other "craters" seen in the
region... Many natural processes take place in taiga - it is like a
photofilm.. But anyway, I advise you not to go "deep" now, as the sparsely
data hardly can clear up a complicated picture.

>- The Novosti story mentions that the impacting body was probably a comet,
>and not an asteroid. Are there any other examples of comets impacting, or
>entering the atmosphere? Are the iron and stone meteorites always asteroid
>material?

I think that expert on meteorites could give more info, but I doubt that it
was a comet.

Having current limited and contraversial info I incline to think that the
most probable explanation is a stony meteoroid (but I don't throw away some
possibility of other scenarious too).  And some data which don't fit into
the stony meteoroid model must be investigated.  For example - could some
peculiarities in radioactivity be explained by the close position of place
of technological nuclear explosions (see my today update in
http://olkhov.narod.ru/news1999.htm)? The investigation can "erase" the
problems, or in opposite, could even reject the model.
Let's wait for more data.

Best wishes,
Andrei Ol'khovatov
Russia, Moscow

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