[meteorite-list] How Many Meteorites Fall?

From: Kelly Webb <kelly_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:37:33 2004
Message-ID: <3A330C5F.514690E1_at_bhil.com>

Hi, Roman,
    I thought about the Claxton mailbox, but hadn't calculated it, Here
goes: assume a mailbox has a cross section of about .06 m^2 (about 15
mailboxes to the square meter) and that there are no more than
60,000,000 rural families with roadside mailboxes. That gives a total
cross section of rural mailboxes of 4 km^2, which should have about one
hit every 2000 years at a fall rate of 60,000 meteorites per year,
making the mailbox hit pretty remarkable. That means we don't have to
check the mailboxes for meteorites too often, unless the "hits" on the
mailbox are coming from eBay auctions ;-)

Kelly Webb

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Roman Jirasek wrote:

> Hi Kelly / list
>
> I read with great interest. Very well done.
> I always knew that there must be a buried
> meteorite somewhere in my home town
> of Milton, Ontario.
>
> Have you considered calculations on mail
> boxes being hit? I'm not aware of any others
> besides Claxton, but you never know. Maybe
> all those destroyed mail boxes every Friday
> night out in the country are not the result of
> young drunk humans after all.
>
> Regards,
> Roman Jirasek
> www.meteoritelabels.com
>
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Received on Sat 09 Dec 2000 11:53:52 PM PST