A Gift from the Sky

Thank you so much for the informative presentation about the meteorite 2024 BX1 that fell in Germany on January 21, 2024. Following the team’s Zoom call last night, I went through the numbers this morning during the half hour I had between waking up and my jog at sunrise. I attach the calculation in the attachment below. Your numbers all make sense. Despite my initial expectations, the slowdown on air is fast even for the 100-gram fragments. As a result, the vertical fall time for 1-gram fragments is of order ten minutes (given that the effective height for air density is of order 5 km). This time is obtained by balancing air friction against gravity, giving a vertical infall speed of order 9 meters per second for 1-gram (centimeter-scale) fragments. <a href="https://avi-loeb.medium.com/a-gift-from-the-sky-101e3dfd2bed">Learn More</a>