[meteorite-list] Allende vs. Nakhla (delete if dull)

From: E.P. Grondine <epgrondine_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:52:13 2004
Message-ID: <20020814200557.66725.qmail_at_web11601.mail.yahoo.com>

Hi all -

Not dull at all...

While it is all real nice to simply find a chunk of
Mars, and not have to pay anyone for it -

I think the way to go with this is to print up some
full color flyers in Arabic and circulate them in the
area. Yeah, you're going to have to pay the finder,
and yeah, you're going to need a reputable Egyptian
academic to sort out all the stuff coming in, but...

your chances of simply going over to Egypt and picking
up a chunk of Mars for "free" are nil, in my humble
opinion

ep




--- David Weir <dgweir_at_earthlink.net> wrote:
> Hello Ron, List,
>
> While I was speculating about an extended (33+ km)
> strewn field for
> Nakhla, which is inferred by the dog impact story,
> Ron suggested a
> comparison with the 48 km long Allende strewn field
> might be in order. I
> agree:
> _____________________________________
>
> ALLENDE -- Thousands of individual stones fell,
> creating the largest
> stone strewn field recorded, measuring 50 km in
> length and at least 300
> kmē in area. The largest recovered specimen was
> found eight months after
> the fall by Guadalupe Juarez as he was hunting a
> rabbit. The meteorite
> created a crater 32 inches by 52 inches and 13
> inches deep, having a
> small rim on the north end. This specimen was
> estimated to have weighed
> ~110 kg before it was fragmented upon impact with
> the hard soil. The
> total recovered weight of the Allende fall was over
> 2,700 kg, a record
> for stone meteorites that is surpassed only by the
> Jilin, China fall in
> 1976 of ~3,600 kg.
> ________________________________
>
> Theoretical models I have seen do not help to
> constrain the
> probabilities of an extended strewn field for
> Nakhla. For instance,
> according to the same "non-peer-reviewed" paper by
> Eugster et al. that I
> referenced yesterday (the minimum preatmospheric
> mass for Nakhla was
> established at ~150 kg), model calculations predict
> the upper limit of
> fragments ejected from Mars to be ~90,700 kg. Based
> on a 50% to 80%
> ablation rate, the final mass could have been as
> large as ~18,000 to
> ~45,000 kg, respectively, plenty large enough to
> produce a strewn field
> extended into Denshal and beyond. Based on this
> maximum ejection mass,
> one could also expect a much larger inundation of
> black stones in the
> surrounding area.
>
> After judging the usefulness of the above data to
> the issue at hand, I
> would rather interpret the pre-atmospheric mass of
> Nakhla from a
> reality-based model, rather than from a
> poorly-constrained theoretical
> one. One such reality-based model was constructed
> for the Shergotty
> mass, with a pre-atmospheric mass value calculated
> at 26 kg. This comes
> from well-established, peer-reviewed research.
> Unfortunately, this is
> the only such case that I uncovered in the
> literature, and may not be
> analogous to Nakhla, but it encourages me in
> reasoning that any
> comparison of the fall of Allende to that of Nakhla
> is probably
> unreasonable.
>
> David
>
> ______________________________________________
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> Meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com
>
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Received on Wed 14 Aug 2002 04:05:57 PM PDT