What do fireballs and meteorites tell us about their origins?
Most of our current knowledge about the origin of meteoroids comes from photographic fireball studies (meteors > magnitude -4) done over the last 50 years or so. This may sound like a long time, but good data has been collected on only about 800 fireballs so far. Of these, only 4 have been recovered on the ground as meteorites. A meteorite-causing fireball is very rare and must be at least magnitude -8 to have sufficient mass to survive the trip. Even with an accurate photographic or video trajectory, it is still a matter of finding a needle in a haystack once the meteorite is on the ground. In recorded scientific history, un-photographed (eyewitnessed) falls have resulted in only about 900 meteorite finds. Studies of meteoroid parent bodies, comets and asteroids, have been more successful, using space probes and infrared telescope studies to greatly increase our knowledge of these objects. What we have found is that, rather than distinct differences between these two smaller solar sys
Most of our current knowledge about the origin of meteoroids comes from photographic fireball studies (meteors > magnitude -4) done over the last 50 years or so. This may sound like a long time, but good data has been collected on only about 800 fireballs so far. Of these, only 4 have been recovered on the ground as meteorites. A meteorite-causing fireball is very rare and must be at least magnitude -8 to have sufficient mass to survive the trip. Even with an accurate photographic or video trajectory, it is still a matter of finding a needle in a haystack once the meteorite is on the ground. In recorded scientific history, un-photographed (eyewitnessed) falls have resulted in only about 900 meteorite finds. Studies of meteoroid parent bodies, comets and asteroids, have been more successful, using space probes and infrared telescope studies to greatly increase our knowledge of these objects. What we have found is that, rather than distinct differences between these two smaller solar sys
