[meteorite-list] Fireball Lights Up Canadian Morning Sky

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:53:32 2004
Message-ID: <200212030030.QAA04841_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.canada.com/edmonton/story.asp?id={7573063B-B63B-4B27-ABBB-D4CC37D8366E}

Fireball lit up our morning skies
Scientists hope photos will lead to rare meteorite
 
Don Thomas
The Edmonton Journal
November 28, 2002

EDMONTON - Edmonton scientists are hoping their photos of a fireball that blazed
through the sky early Wednesday morning will lead them to a rare meteorite.

Several early risers reported seeing a fireball with purple and green hues
shortly after 5 a.m., said Frank Florian, an astronomer at the Odyssium.

A Grande Prairie woman who saw it south of her city was one of 25 callers.

A special camera operated for Athabasca University on top of the University
of Alberta physics building recorded it moving from the southwest horizon to
the northwest for about seven seconds starting at 5:10 a.m.

It was bright enough to indicate that it may have survived the fiery descent
and a meteorite could be found in the Drayton Valley area, said Martin Connors,
an Athabasca University space scientist in charge of the meteorite observatory.

Airline pilots in the Calgary area also reported seeing it, said Alan Hildebrand,
a University of Calgary geologist who oversees an array of celestial cameras near
Calgary.

If the meteorite is found and its path through space to Earth can be tracked with
more than one camera, it will be a very rare event, Connors said.

Only about 50 meteorites have been found in Canada. And only six times have
scientists been able to pinpoint the celestial origins of a meteorite.

If they can find and track this meteorite's path through space, it would be the
seventh with a proven pedigree, said Martin, who has a Canada research chair in
astrophysics and describes himself as a kind of "space prospector."

Knowing more about its origin would shed more light on the structure of space
material and could help in tracking asteroids which periodically endanger the
Earth when their orbits come too close, he said. Martin's observatory includes
four cameras at Edmonton, Ardrossan, Devon and Athabasca. The cameras are
activated by bright objects which appear overhead.

While the U of A camera frequently records passing helicopters and aircraft, it
records some type of fireball about once a month, said Connors. But only about
once a year does it "see" one as bright as Wednesday's fireball.

Alberta and the Prairies are hotspots for meteorites, not because more fall there,
but because the cultivated fields make them easier to find than in forested or more
thinly populated areas.

Fourteen of Canada's meteorites were found in Alberta, including the largest, the
303-kilogram Bruderheim meteorite which fell east of Edmonton in 1960.

The U of A's collection of 120 meteorites from around the world is matched only
by a national collection in Ottawa. It includes several pieces of the Bruderheim
meteorite and 11 others which fell in Alberta. The collection is closed to the
public, but samples are on display at the Odyssium, said curator Pat Cavell.

Meteorites that have been found usually look like stony pieces of rock. But some
are made of iron with a shinier surface, while a few are a mix of rock and iron.
In August, 1997, a black rock the size of a person's head found near Winnipeg
turned out to be a meteorite.

Last summer, a British teenager in North Yorkshire reported that one struck her
foot. The walnut-sized stone had a bubbled surface and tiny indentations like
volcanic lava.
Received on Mon 02 Dec 2002 07:30:52 PM PST