CompuServe Thread

Hello Doug, I'll make a comment here but Joseph may have already replied by the time I post. I remember reading or talking with someone who knew a great deal about the fall. I have also seen a full cast made of the meteorite and the way it looked after the fall. It is quite obvious that it has broken off a larger mass. Also video taken of the fall confirms this. I just found the article sent to me by another. It suggests that four pieces or more should be recoverable from this fall. Looks like lower southeastern Pennsylvania would be one area of possible recovery. The trajectory is estimated from eastern Kentuck to northern West Virginia to south to southeastern Pennsylvania over New Jersey to Peekskill New York. There is an awful lot of water in that area where it could now be resting. It would have had to cross a river to get to Peekskill. I have a small piece (crumb) of that fall. It does have some fussion crust on it though with the grey interior visable from the other side. –AL

Hey Doug, Hope you got Al's answer cuz I couldn't have answered it better. I read somewhere that the projected size responsible for the Peekskill bolide was anticipated to be 5-10 times the mass of the recovered bowling-ball individual. That's still smaller than what I'd have guessed from the report of the bolide. From the glossy photo I've got of the stone, aside from the obvious red paint blemish on one corner and a cracked off portion of crust where it must've collided with the concrete driveway, the individual did look angular and suggestive of secondary ablation crusts along the more angular surfaces. If the other pieces were larger, then they would've fallen further north along the path of the known fragment. With such a shallow trajectory as was reported for this meteorite, that would still cover likely more than 50 linear miles! That's a lot of land to cover!…a surface area bigger than all of Oahu! When the Sikhote Alin iron meteorite fell in in Novoprokovka, Russia off the Sea of Japan, on Febuary 12, 1947, at 10:38 a.m. "a flaming fireball as large as the Sun,…and just as bright!" travelled from North to South, changing in various brillant colors, but predominantly red. A ground rumble was felt almost a hundred miles away in Vladivostok, rattling and breaking windows. Multiple impact craters were found, and curiously, the largest meteorites found were not in the largest craters, which contained only smaller fragments, shrapnel pieces (like the 6 kg piece I have). Eventually, 23 TONS of meteoritic iron was found!! Now THAT was a meteorite fall, … as versus ole Peekskill or St. Roberts, Montreal a few weeks ago. ( Now that the CCCP's breaking up, more of these meteorites seem to be reaching the meteorite markets here…keep your eyes open for great space debris momento's!) –Joseph