[meteorite-list] Fusion Crusted "Meteoroids"

From: Chris Peterson <clp_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:08:41 -0600
Message-ID: <B56A8F2AFB8D4A78825A588933B64016_at_bellatrix>

There are not many potential crust forming bodies- a few dozen at most.
Neither is there a lot of meteoroid material whizzing around. Meteoroids
come from two populations: comets and the asteroid belt. Earth-crossing
cometary material is short lived, decaying into the Sun in just thousands of
years (and in general, very little of this is likely to survive a grazing
encounter with the Earth). Material in the asteroid belt generally stays
there. A tiny fraction is occasionally perturbed out and into an Earth
crossing orbit (or an orbit crossing another body with an atmosphere). Any
such meteoroids will largely be in orbits without any long term stability,
so again, they aren't likely to persist more than a few million years.

I disagree completely with your assessment that our scientific knowledge
about meteoroids and meteorites is based on guesses. Understanding of
meteoroid dynamics and of meteorite formation and chemistry is solidly based
on theory which is supported by a great deal of observational evidence.
There's really no "guessing" involved.

Chris

*****************************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com


----- Original Message -----
From: <cdtucson at cox.net>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>; "Meteorites USA"
<eric at meteoritesusa.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 12:39 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Fusion Crusted "Meteoroids"


> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,272212,00.html
>
> Eric
> thank you. This is a point I tried to make a week or so ago. Someone
> commented that there is a lot of guessing??? That is the understatement of
> the year. Most of our scientific knowledge in this hobby is based on
> Guesses. We simply have no way of knowing a lot of this info with
> certainty.
> I have yet to see a scientist voice an opinion here. They know better.
> The truth is that we have no idea how much meteoritic material that ends
> up on Earth had fusion crust prior to entering our atmosphere. Further
> when you look up into space there are a gazzillion sources of crust
> producing bodies. Hello, Look up! And look at the age of most meteorites.
> It seem to me 4.56 billion years gives these space travelers plenty of
> time to have visited enough places to pick up fusion crusts here and
> there. Look at odds. "Even a blind squirrel gets a nut once in a while."
> I earlier went on to theorize that perhaps this pre-fusion crust might
> actually help protect the material and up the odds of a safe landing here
> on earth. ( Yes it becomes a heat shield and helps protect the material
> at least enough to salvage some of the material.) This only makes sense
> because we all know that some finds and falls simple have NO crust at all.
> There is not a scientist on this list that can say with certainty why that
> is. Yes they can guess but not all meteorites have crust and most of the
> ones that do not will simply never be recognized. How could they be?
> scientists won't look at stuff that does not have crust. They say stuff
> like" it looks Terrestrial" ! Duh!! A lot of rocks from space do look
> terrestrial. In large a stupid thing to say, I think! And If it also
> looks like a meteorite, it at least needs to be looked at. I will qualify
> that statement by saying , if it were found by a real hunter who knows
> what he is doing and finds the thing in an out-of-place location. It
> deserves to be at least looked at. How else will we ever find anything
> unusual or from Venus or Mercury or even Earth meteorites???
> Even stuff that falls through a roof like in NJ recently they never
> bothered to publish what the actual material was. They just called it
> space junk. What is that? Isn't our time worth figuring out where the
> space junk came from. USA, Russia, Timbuktu? We should know. This is
> important info with regard to all of the space junk floating around up
> there. Worth a study to find out why a solid chunk of metal would hit a
> roof. What made it so solid. Did it start out as sheet metal or was it a
> part from an engine? This NJ junk should be studied and the results
> published. This might help us figure out the mechanics of junk in space or
> whatever!. Science just blew it off. Great move science.
> Carl Esparza
> IMCA 5829
> Meteoritemax
Received on Wed 25 Mar 2009 04:08:41 PM PDT