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Meteorite Hunters Find the West Texas Fireball

Posted by kdawson on from the sweet-dreams-and-flying-machines-in-pieces-on-the-ground dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A fireball streaked over Austin, Texas on February 15 producing sonic booms and startling people for hundreds of miles. The video of the event was shown on national television and viewed by thousands of people on the Net. The first news reports speculated that the fireball might have been debris from a February 13th collision between two satellites over Siberia but space experts said that the object was probably a meteor. Now this has been confirmed: experienced meteorite hunters located a strewnfield about 120 miles north of the filming site of the Austin cameraman and have recovered over 100 freshly fallen meteorites."

4 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Pure speculation... by TapeCutter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...but I wonder if it had anything to do with this. Perhaps the asteroid has passed this way before and was broken into smaller chunks by gravity. Would be interesting to see if someone could figure out the fireballs tragectory.

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    1. Re:Pure speculation... by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 4, Informative

      If it had broken up before it entered the atmosphere, it would have been much more widely scattered. Very small aerodynamic effects around the rocks way up in the upper atmosphere would cause their entry trajectories to be very different... the individual rocks would likely have landed hundreds of miles apart, not clustered around a single farmer's field.

      In other words, in such circumstances the Butterfly Effect has vastly more influence on small, irregular objects than it is on, say, a large, smooth, symmetrical, engineered re-entry vehicle.

  2. West, Texas, not West Texas by Dahan · · Score: 5, Informative

    The town is named West, and it's not actually in West Texas--it's more Central Texas.

  3. Re:Feed the Trolls by krystar · · Score: 4, Informative

    well technically, you could get hit by a meteor. a meteor doesn't become a meteorite until it lands on the ground. if you got hit by the falling object, that'd be a meteor hit. if it impacted ground and fragmented into debris and hit you, then it'd be a meteorite hit.