Dutch scientists fete rare meteorite find 2017

Dutch scientists fete rare meteorite find 2017

Some more details on this one: the meteorite in question is an Ordinary Chondrite, an L6, which is provisionally named Broek in Waterland (this name still has to be approved, so is not official yet). The classification was done by Leo Kriegsman and me at Naturalis (the Dutch National Museum of Natural History) in Leiden.

It is a witnessed fall that happened in the very early local evening of January 11th, 16:09 UT (17:09 local time, sun only 3 degrees below the horizon - too early for our all-sky network unfortunately). There are many visual reports but only one video so far, from a car dashcam from Belgium some 165 km distant from the fall site, which shows the fireball going down almost vertically. The azimuth of the fireball on that video matches the find locality well. Weather radar and military flight radar have been checked, but nothing registered.

The stone weighs 530 grams and is fully fusion crust covered. It impacted on the roof of a garden shed near the village of Broek in Waterland, which is in a rural area just north of Amsterdam. The owners of the shed discovered it the next day when they saw roofing tile sherds lying around, then discovered the hole in the roof and the stone lodged in it. It took some 3 weeks before the news of this reached us, through Niek de Kort of the Royal Dutch Astronomy Association who was contacted by the finders. Leo and me then visited the fall locality on February 3 and identified it as a meteorite.

There is only one stone: we have meticulously searched a large area around the impact location with a team of volunteers in the weeks afterwards, but found nothing. Part of the area is a peat swamp and there is a lot of open water there ("Waterland" in Dutch translates the same in English, and there is a reason the village is named thus...).

It is only the 6th preserved meteorite of our small country in 177 years time.
Some more pictures of the new meteorite are here:
https://langbrom.home.xs4all.nl/broek.html


Dr. Marco Langbroek
web: http://meteorieten.langbroek.org

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