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RE: US DOD FIREBALL RELEASE

>    I'm curious.  Surely you know Gene's dead, died in car crash
>Australia last year, and that his wife  Carolyn is still alive?

Yes, I knew that.  I've met Gene on a number of occasions.

>    I did not know that the AF released past  sensor data back in
>1994.  When I met Harrison Scmitt yesterday at the Orbital
>stockholders meeting, he told me that Gene had worked with air
>pressure data trying to extract bollide events from them.  I don't
>think that he ever knew about the AF's acoustic arrays.

The Air Force press releases have been available on the Internet since 1994.
If Gene didn't know about them, then that is a pity.  I do know Gene didn't seem
care too much about the Internet in 1994.

I remember very clearly on July 16, 1994, when Fragment A (the first impact)
of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter.  Calar Alto Observatory sent me their
images of the impact, which showed without any doubt that not only was
the impact plume clearly visible, but we were going to be in for a good show
that week with the remaining impacts. I had that image on my web site just a 
few hours after it had occurred.  (That was my first home page, by the way,
and it is still online: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9).  It was quickly 
followed by images from the South Africa Astronomical Observatory and Teide 
Observatory.   A couple of hours later, Gene Shoemaker, unaware of the images 
on the Internet, stated at a NASA press conference that there was no reports 
of any plumes being observed yet.  At the second press conference, he
mentioned the positive impact sightings that were reported on the Comet SL9
exploder list.  He wouldn't see his first image until the Hubble
images came down later that evening.  By then, I already had images of
the impact from 7 different observatories on my web site.

Ron Baalke