[meteorite-list] Scientists Outline Meteors' Paths in Colorado/Utah

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:06:58 2004
Message-ID: <200210100052.RAA00210_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www2.dailycamera.com/bdc/state_news/article/0,1713,BDC_2419_1467808,00.html

Scientists outline meteors' paths

Experts skeptical even small meteorite pieces will be found
By Katy Human
Daily Camera
October 9, 2002

DENVER - "We have the fireball surrounded," a Denver geologist said Tuesday
afternoon, less than 48 hours after the first of two fiery meteors streaked through
Colorado's evening skies.

By analyzing reports of more than 600 people who saw brilliant light shoot across
the night sky, experts with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science have
reconstructed the path of Sunday's event, the more impressive of the two.

>From Utah, people saw a multi-colored meteor race through the eastern sky; from
Wyoming, it appeared in the south; from the Front Range, it appeared to the west;
and from southern Colorado, it appeared north, said Jack Murphy, geology curator
at the museum.

"We think it came down very fast and very bright over central Colorado to this
area," he said, circling in blue a chunk of remote desert land in western Colorado,
from the Utah border to Rangely and Fruita.

The object probably accelerated quickly in Earth's atmosphere, streaking faster
than 20,000 mph by the time it was 10 or 15 miles above the surface, Murphy
speculated. At that point, the shock wave created by such acceleration could have
split the meteorite into many pieces, which fell to the ground or disintegrated.

Doug Duncan, director of the University of Colorado's Fiske Planetarium, was
pessimistic that anyone would stumble upon a chunk of meteorite.

"For every correct meteorite an amateur collects, there's 10 'meteorwrongs,'" he
joked. "And these things typically burn at 100 miles up. They can look pretty close,
but that's deceptive."

Still, Murphy would love to find a piece of the thing to study, he said, and asked
that anyone hunting or hiking in the area keep an eye out for unusual black rocks
that might look somewhat out of place. The mineral composition would tell
scientists where the rock came from - the moon, Mars or the asteroid belt - and
some meteorites contain fascinating surprises.

A meteorite found in Canada a few years ago, for example, contained carbon-rich
molecules, Murphy said, which support a theory that meteorites may have carried
to Earth some of the molecules necessary for life.

"We'd like to find something like that that would really contribute to science,"
Murphy said.

But any pieces that hit the ground could be very small: When it entered the Earth's
atmosphere, the meteorite might have been as small as a baseball or a golf ball,
Murphy said, "amazingly small given the size of the light."

Most eyewitness accounts had Monday's meteor streaking south from central
Colorado toward New Mexico, and physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory
near Albuquerque are leading investigations on that event, Murphy said.

But Howard Cook, chief technologist at the Denver museum, witnessed Monday's
meteor on his drive home to Colorado Springs, around 7:15 p.m. The light appeared
to the west of Interstate 25, he said, and streaked south, disappearing once and
recovering before sputtering out again.

"It was a very large, bright green fireball," Cook said. "It was quite beautiful, this
great green fireball with orange sparks coming out of the back."

Murphy said the second meteor was probably nothing more than a shocking
coincidence - researchers can't link the two events to any known meteor showers
or an area of space known to be rich in debris.

Contact Katy Human at (303) 473-1364 or humank_at_dailycamera.com.
Received on Wed 09 Oct 2002 08:52:04 PM PDT