[meteorite-list] Snohomish Fireball Updates

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon Jun 7 01:21:15 2004
Message-ID: <200406070521.WAA13961_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

>Here is a link to an article that mentions the
> coordinates and us:
>
> http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/176336_meteor04.html
>

Meteor lights the sky above Snohomish
Seismologists help locate burst some had reported as UFO

By TOM PAULSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
June 4, 2004

It was earthquake scientists rather than astronomers who
figured out exactly where in the sky a meteor exploded
early yesterday, causing a brilliant flash seen from Oregon
to British Columbia.

"We located the burst northeast of Snohomish," said Bill
Steele, spokesman for the Pacific Northwest Seismograph
Network at the University of Washington.

The meteor appears to have exploded about 27
miles above and 6.4 miles northeast of the city
of Snohomish, Steele said.

The explosion in the sky registered on the
region's many quake detectors, allowing UW
seismologist Steve Malone to locate it by
triangulation. Sound travels much slower in air
than in rock, so Malone had to make
mathematical adjustments to account for this.

Malone said the seismic data showed it didn't
produce the kind of sound waves that might be
expected.

"What was interesting to us is we saw only a
point source (a single explosion) there,"
Malone said, rather than the sonic-boom kind
of sound wave that comes as an object rapidly
enters the atmosphere.

Cautioning that his expertise is with rocks on
Earth rather than from space, he speculated
that this indicates the meteor came in at a
fairly steep angle rather than the gentler slope
of attack typically associated with meteors.

Others aren't so sure about what happened.

"I don't think it was a meteor, man," said
Christophe Frey, a North Seattle resident who
witnessed the spectacular event at about 2:40
a.m. yesterday and reported it to the
Seattle-based National UFO Reporting
Center.

"With all the bad stuff going on around the
world, at first I thought it was like a missile
from North Korea or something," Frey said
with a laugh. "I've seen lots of meteors, and
this was something else."

Peter Davenport, director of the UFO reporting
center, said he's received more than a dozen
calls about the event -- and he thinks it was a
meteor. "It just sounds like another rock from
space to me," Davenport said.

University of Washington astronomer and
meteor expert Toby Smith said it was likely a
highly unusual, larger meteor known as a
"bolide."

"These are very rare events," he said. "Large
objects are just not that common. Most of the
things that hit the Earth are the size of a dust
grain."

Fragments of this large meteor, which was estimated
to have been about 2 cubic feet in size, could have
made it to the ground, Smith said.

It's hard to even know where to begin looking for
such fragments, he said, given the anecdotal
evidence of its path across the sky.

Frey said the object he saw was in the north,
traveling from the northwest to northeast, and
that its bright orange light flared out just before
it would have reached the horizon and escaped
his line of sight.

"It was like staring at the sun," he said. "It was
brighter than anything else I've ever seen in
the sky. I'm going to take it as an omen, a good omen."

Greg Hupe of Renton hopes to take it home.

"Last year, I was in Kenya for three weeks looking for
meteorites," Hupe said. He and his brother Adam,
retired owners of a computer business, travel around
the world hunting for meteorites.

They have partners in Morocco who alert them of potential
finds. Last year, they jumped on an airplane to Chicago
because of reports of space rocks crashing into some homes
there. Now, it seems, they may be able to hunt closer to home.

"It's the oldest material in the solar system," Hupe said.
"It's what we're all made of. ... We're all stardust."

The Hupe brothers are waiting for either a confirmed find
from this local space invader, or else a fairly precise
estimate of its trajectory after the explosion.

"As soon as we can get that, we're there," Greg Hupe said.

Malone said further analysis of the seismic signal, along
with whatever other evidence is out there (such as the
meteor's velocity), might produce a trajectory for hunters
such as the Hupe brothers.

"It's possible," Malone said.
Received on Mon 07 Jun 2004 01:21:03 AM PDT