[meteorite-list] re: Fireball Seen From Germany, Belgium

From: Marco Langbroek <marco.langbroek_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:32:06 2004
Message-ID: <00f201c3e111$8d9dab80$49ccea3e_at_HAL>

> There are already track and brightness data?

Hello Martin,

There's a preliminary trajectory from visual sightings in Belgium and the
Netherlands. Phillipe Mollet of the Belgian VVS has been working on that.
Fireball started over Belgium and ended over Germany.

> Or how could the ESA-man predict, that the meteorite will have a size of
> 10 - 50cm?
>
> Martin A.

Just guesswork I think. There's little definit data to go by at the moment.

By the way, in commenting on these kind of news agency reports, be aware
that press agencies not always correctly quote people, and sometimes condens
two separate bits of correct info into one wrong statement and things
frequently get mixed up or confused (e.g. meteor/meteorite). For example,
the DMS spokesman quoted is me, but I spoke to them about this being
definitely a meteor, not being definitely a meteorite (as we simply do not
know whether something survived or not); and I warned them that not each
bright fireball automatically means it dropped a meteorite. They do quote me
correctly in that we can rule out a satellite decay, this being based on
checking data from the NASA Orbital Information Group.

- Marco

------
Dr Marco Langbroek
Dutch Meteor Society (DMS)
Leiden, the Netherlands
52.15896 N, 4.48884 E (WGS 84)

e-mail: meteorites_at_dmsweb.org
DMS website: http://www.dmsweb.org
priv. website: http://home.wanadoo.nl/marco.langbroek
------
Received on Thu 22 Jan 2004 12:59:12 PM PST