4.5 Fireballs as an Atmospheric Source of Meteoritic Dust

Extract

This note emphasizes the importance of very bright fireballs as a powerful source of meteoritic dust in the upper atmosphere and on the Earth’s surface. Recently we obtained a direct observational evidence when we photographed the Šumava Fireball, an object of −22 absolute stellar magnitude, on Dec. 4, 1974 at 17^h57.5^m UT. This is the brightest object on the European Network photographic records during almost 12 years of systematic fireball observations. We obtained 4. all-sky-camera records of the Šumava Fireball from two Czech and one German station of the Network. The most important combination for the trajectory computations proved to be station No. 5 at Ondrejov (Astronomical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences) and station No. 65 at Bernau (Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Heidelberg). The results are given in Table 1. At Ondřejov we also obtained 4 spectral records of the Šumava Fireball; the most detailed record has a dispersion of 5 Å/mm.