Russia Meteor News-Past Super-Bolide Vitim 24SEP02 2JUL09

Some atmospheric and magnetospheric effects possibly related to the Vitim bolide impact
E.A. Kasatkina and O.I. Shumilov
Institute of North Industrial Ecology Problems, Kola Science Centre RAS, 184209 Apatity,
Russia

Sensors aboard US Department of Defence satellites detected the impact of a bolide
on 24 September 2002 at 16:49 UT. The bolide had disappeared at an altitude of
30 km above the Vitim river, Siberia (58.21N, 113.46E). The total radiated energy
was 8.6x10ˆ11 Joules. An unusual infrasonic event with a 30-minute duration has
been detected by the Apatity infrasonic array at Kola Peninsula (67.3N, 33.3E) on
September 24, 2002 at 22:20 UT. The infrasonic signal had been detected by three
spatially separated microbarographs operating in the passband from 0.0001 to 1 Hertz
at a distance of 4000 km from the source. Estimates of the local infrasound velocity
and the direction of the signal arrival seem to be in agreement with the acoustic travel
velocity and the source azimuth. We cannot exclude that the Vitim bolide (or minicomet)
effects were as well appeared at some other atmospheric and magnetospheric
phenomena, e.g. in magnetic disturbances at high latitude stations, cosmic radionoise
absorption, variations of air conductivity. These effects are compared with some other
similar effects related to different bolides like Tunguska and Brasilian ones. A possible
nature of the effects is discussed.
The work was partially supported by Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant N
05-06-97528) and also by RAS program "Electric processes and radiophysical methods
of investigations". http://www.cosis.net/abstracts/EGU05/00257/EGU05-J-00257.pdf

Geophysical Research Abstracts, Vol. 7, 00257, 2005
SRef-ID: 1607-7962/gra/EGU05-A-00257
© European Geosciences Union 2005