Earth-grazing daylight fireball of August 10, 1972
Abstract
A daylight fireball flew over the U.S. and Canada on Aug 10., 1972 with its trajectory tangential to the Earth surface and perigee at approximately 58 km. The fireball body lost only part of its mass and continued to move in a changed orbit. Unique observations by infrared radiometer tracking were acquired by Rawcliffe et al. (1974). The original paper and also Jacchia's paper (1974) on this fireball both contain several mistakes and misprints. This paper brings correct values and refers to my original paper (1979) for details. Especially, the extremely large mass of this meteoroid, frequently cited from Jacchia's paper, is not correct. New models of meteoroid ablation and fragmentation applied to this fireball yielded approximately equals 5 m as the most probable size of the body at perigee. The maximum possible size of the body in its orbit at present is 10 m with a dark fusion crust on its surface. The body will come again close to the Earth sometime bewteen 1997 July 30 and Aug 16, and the Earth will be at the same point 1997 Aug 11. But this is just a rough estimate from semimajor axis and its standard deviations. Solutions with incorporated gravitational perturbations are needed for any recovery efforts.
- Publication:
-
Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Pub Date:
- March 1994
- Bibcode:
- 1994A&A...283..287C
- Keywords:
-
- Earth Atmosphere;
- Earth Surface;
- Meteoroids;
- Orbit Calculation;
- Ablation;
- Infrared Radiometers;
- Perigees;
- Standard Deviation;
- EARTH;
- METEOROIDS;
- FIREBALL;
- TRAJECTORY;
- EARTH-BASED OBSERVATIONS;
- RADIOMETRY;
- INFRARED;
- WAVELENGTH;
- MASS;
- MODEL;
- ABLATION;
- SIZE;
- FRAGMENTATION;
- ORBIT;
- METEORS;
- Astrophysics; Miscellaneous