[meteorite-list] DOD Satellites Detect March 2003 Bolide Over Park Forest

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:21:00 2004
Message-ID: <200307082243.PAA15969_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

>
> The distribution from Olympia Fields/Park Forest to Steger/Beecher would
> argue that the flight path was NW to SE or vice versa.

Or vice versa? That's 180 degrees in the opposite direction! It is interesting
you report that way though. It may be an observing effect depending on whether
the fireball was observed from north or south its flight path.

Note that the DOD satellite measured the flight path angle at 62 degrees from
the horizontal, or 28 degrees from the vertical. That means the meteorite fall
was more vertical than horizontal. I think this somewhat vertical flight path
may have made judging the flight direction
more difficult from the ground, maybe creating an optical illusion effect. It is already
well-documented the difficulty in judging the distance to fireballs from a single
location. Even if the true flight path was SW to NE as the DOD data indicates, and this
would extend the strewnfield out to a larger size along the flight path direction,
the near-vertical drop does constrain the size of the strewnfield ellipse.

I'm very heavily inclined to believe the DOD satellite measurements are more accurate than
the ground observations anyway, because the satellite was designed to accurately
record these type of details.

Ron Baalke
Received on Tue 08 Jul 2003 06:43:09 PM PDT