Editor's Summary

25 August 2005

Fate of a fireball

Most of the mass of a meteoroid goes up (or comes down) in smoke: the largest of them can reach the ground but only 1–25% of the initial mass ever gets that far. The mystery of what happens to the rest can at last be addressed by direct observation, because one of the largest meteoroids to have entered the atmosphere during the past decade was caught in the act. As it disintegrated over Antarctica on 3 September last year, space-based infrared and light sensors detected the fireball and an 8-km-long debris trail. Spectral properties of this meteoric smoke reveal dust similar to olivine, a silicate mineral common in meteorites. Most of the dust consisted of particles about a thousandth of a millimetre in diameter, much larger than those normally regarded as being produced by atmospheric disintegration of rocky bodies.

Letter: Meteoritic dust from the atmospheric disintegration of a large meteoroid

Andrew R. Klekociuk, Peter G. Brown, Dee W. Pack, Douglas O. ReVelle, W. N. Edwards, Richard E. Spalding, Edward Tagliaferri, Bernard B. Yoo and Joseph Zagari

doi:10.1038/nature03881

First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (495K) | Supplementary information