The Pribram, Lost City, Innisfree, and Neuschwanstein Falls: An Analysis of the Atmospheric Trajectories

摘要

To date, several meteorites have been found for which their flight in the atmosphere was recorded by special fireball camera networks. Because of this, a thorough analysis of the instrumentally registered falls is of current importance. For such fireballs, not only the high-quality photo images of the motion in the atmosphere exist, but also the density and the shape of the meteor body fragments reached the Earth's surface are known for sure. In the present study, for the Innisfree, Lost City, and Pribram fireballs, new models of the entry to the atmosphere have been built. The values of the ballistic coefficient and the mass-loss parameter providing the best approximation for the observations of the luminous trajectory segment with the analytical solution of the meteor physics equations have been obtained. From recent results of the numerical experiments on the supersonic airflow of bodies of various shapes, the preatmospheric masses of the fireballs, as well as the dynamic estimates of the mass at the other trajectory points, were obtained. In particular, the terminal mass of the fireballs in the lower segment of the analyzed trajectories is in good agreement with the total mass of the meteorite material recovered in all of the cases considered. Moreover, to calculate the acceleration of the meteor bodies, a new analytical formula has been suggested, which allows the obtained theoretical time dependencies of the velocity and altitude to be compared with the observational data.