Mike Farmer`s Team Finds Three More Today 19FEB09

West, Texas Meteorite found by (c) Michael Farmer 2009

I just spoke with Mike Farmer on the telephone and they have found three more meteorites today. He said that the area is mostly farm and pasture land making it not the most idea for hunting conditions.

UNT astronomy workers say they found 2 samples of meteor 19FEB09

UNT astronomy workers say they found 2 samples of meteor
03:14 PM CST on Thursday, February 19, 2009
By SARAH PERRY / The Dallas Morning News

Ron DiIulio slept for only an hour last night.
The director of the planetarium and astronomy lab program at the University of North Texas couldn’t help but stay awake and study the pieces of a meteorite he found with a co-worker Wednesday.

MAX FAULKNER/Special Contributor Ron DiIulio (left), director of UNT's planetarium and astronomy lab program, and UNT observatory manager Preston Starr found these fragments, believed to be from a meteor that burned up in the earth's atmosphere earlier this week, in a pasture in West.



DiIulio and Preston Starr, the observatory manager at UNT, discovered the remnants of a meteor spotted shooting across the Texas sky Sunday.
They found the two walnut-sized fragments off a road in West, a town about 70 miles south of Dallas.
DiIulio has found other meteorites before, but these pieces are special. “To get something from space ... that’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” he said. “And these are pristine.”
Immediately after learning about the sighting, the two men began to pinpoint the possible location with information from witnesses. The pair systematically mapped the locations and narrowed down the spot to somewhere near Fayetteville, about 230 miles south of Dallas.

They guessed wrong.
DiIulio said he and Starr wound their way to West and stopped at the Czech Bakery for a snack. A farmer, who noticed their official NASA-UNT outfits, approached them and asked what they were doing.
“Are you guys looking for the sonic boom that rattled my walls?” DiIulio recalled the farmer asking.
The farmer told the professors they should head southeast of West.
DiIulio and Starr spotted the sheriff and a deputy at a gas station near the location provided by the farmer. The deputy owned some land nearby and offered to help them find the meteorite.
At 5 p.m., after walking a few minutes down a gravel road, Starr and DiIulio spotted it - a small, charcoal-colored ball. Five minutes later, they found another.
They didn’t use any fancy electronics - just a map, truck and their eyes.
“Imagine that,” DiIulio said. “A little piece of charcoal sitting on a gravel road right there.”
The pair were lucky they found the pieces first, he said. Scientists from Moscow and two men from Tucson were also on the prowl.
DiIulio and Starr wrapped the pieces in a Ziploc bag and took them back to UNT, where they are conducting a radioisotope study today. The study will give clues about other matter in space.
DiIulio said it was important to find the pieces quickly because they start to lose certain characteristics once they hit the earth’s atmosphere.
Alan Rubin, a research geochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the meteorite that landed in Texas is among the most common kinds -- an ordinary chondrite.
He said his lab had been called on to analyzed a piece of the substance -- not from the chunks that DiIulio and Starr found -- and "it's a real meteorite, not a piece of a satellite."
Though meteorites are found all over world, DiIulio considers himself lucky. Mostly what's out there are tiny pieces -- some as small as a grain of sand.
“Every once in a while ... you get this,” he said.

Austin- Fox News Video: http://www.myfoxaustin.com/dpp/news/021909_Meteorite_Pieces_Located_in_West_TX

UNT astronomers say they found 2 samples of meteorites near WEST, TX 18FEB09

UNT astronomers say they found 2 samples of meteor
By REGINA L. BURNS Associated Press Writer © 2009 The Associated Press
Feb. 18, 2009, 10:52PM
houston_chron196:http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/buzz/6270243.html

DALLAS — Two samples of fresh material the "size of large pecans" from a meteor that alarmed numerous residents when it streaked across the Texas sky on Sunday have been found by two University of North Texas astronomers in a pasture east of the small town of West.
"The pieces that we found have beautiful ablation crust. And it's black like charcoal. Underneath this crust the color of the rock is concrete like gray," said Ron DiLulio, director of the planetarium and astronomy lab program at the University of North Texas in Denton.
DiLulio and Preston Starr, UNT's observatory manager, said they found the pieces Wednesday about 5 p.m. after starting their search from Fort Worth at 3 a.m. using calculations from all of the calls they had received.
DiLulio said they had just about given up looking and were driving back when a friend called and asked to meet them at a certain intersection. They said that coincided with conversations they had had earlier that day with citizens at a restaurant.
"We decided rather than try to get permission from landowners, there would be pieces in a line that would spread out a mile across. We decided to just do the county roads and we just started walking down that road and it's fairly easy to see. It jumped out at us within 15 minutes," DiLulio said.
"We came back to where our gut instinct told us," Starr said. He said the McLennan County sheriff and deputies confirmed what citizens had told them.
"The sheriff told his deputy to take us out there," DiLulio said.
The astronomers placed the samples in ZipLoc bags to keep out the air. They plan to transfer the samples to membrane cases and take them to the university for additional study.
People on Sunday reported seeing a fireball streak across the sky and DiLulio said the reason it created such a fireball was because the meteor expanded and broke into pieces.
The pair said they were not alone in the search and ran into others including "a commercial meteorite hunter and we wanted to get there so we could have it first for science," DiLulio said.
Starr said the pair had been gathering information since they initially learned of the meteor's appearance.
"We did a lot of pre-planning. We looked at the angles of what they saw in the sky and we were able to map it all out. We put a plan together and we drove around small country roads. Texas has lots of small farm to market roads," Starr said.
DiLulio said he thinks there are larger pieces still to be found.
"We feel that there are probably several hundred pieces. What happens when these things fall — they may break apart. We want to find these early and study the primitive material before our atmosphere affects them," DiLulio said
He said the pair planned on returning to the areas where they had searched.
"Everytime we find one we mark where it is on the map and we can measure how much material actually hit the surface of the earth," DiLulio said.
West is about 70 miles south of Dallas.
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On the Web:
University of North Texas, http://www.unt.edu/

Fireball Over Texas 15FEB09

Fiery debris seen in Texas skies not from satellite collision, officials say11:20 PM CST on Sunday, February 15, 2009 By RUDOLPH BUSH / The Dallas Morning News

Fiery debris burned through the Texas sky Sunday morning, alarming some and enchanting others but resulting in no apparent injury or damage. Video from Dallas to Austin and beyond, sightings were reported of a red and orange fireball with a small black center speeding toward Earth before burning out in a trail of lingering white smoke. Roland Herwig, spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration’s southwest division, said the fireball was probably superheated debris from a broken satellite falling to Earth.The FAA could not directly link the debris to the reported collision last week of Russian and U.S. communications satellites, however. “It’s yet to be proved it’s those satellites,” Herwig said. However, a spokeswoman for U.S. Strategic Command said the fireball spotted in the Texas skies Sunday was unrelated to the satellite collision. Air Force Major Regina Winchester said that Joint Space Operations Center at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base has been monitoring the debris from the collision, and that could not have caused the dramatic sight. She also said the fireball was not related to the estimated 18,000 man-made objects that the center also monitors. “There was no predicted re-entry,” Winchester said about the objects in Earth’s orbit.She said it could possibly have been a natural phenomenon such as a meteorite. It’s unclear exactly how many pieces of debris tumbled toward Texas or whether any more are on the way.The potential danger from debris did prompt the FAA to warn pilots nationwide to be aware of the hazard and to immediately report any sightings. State emergency management officials and local law enforcement agencies also were on alert across much of Texas. Based on reports of a fireball near Waco, local law enforcement officers searched for debris but found nothing, a Texas Department of Public Safety spokeswoman said. Though no one could pinpoint where the debris fell or if it even remained intact through the burnout, the fireball left an impression on those who saw it. They say it burned anywhere from a few seconds to nearly a minute. And in some areas, particularly in East Texas, there were reports of a sonic boom. While it may not be clear for some time what fell from the sky, it seemed to be a singular event.Most sightings in Texas were reported about 11 a.m. Some people thought it was a meteor. Others thought perhaps it was a plane crashing. Doug Schmidt of Richardson was driving south on Central Expressway near the Bush Turnpike when he saw a flash of light in the sky. “It was like a ball of flame with a tail. It looked like a meteor,” he said. “There was flame and then a flash and smoke trailing it. I said ‘Wow, look at that.’ ”Farther south, in Ovilla, Chris Weaver said he stepped outside and just by chance looked south. That’s when he saw a flash of orange moving fast in the sky before burning into a streak of white smoke. “If you were looking up at the southern sky, you couldn’t miss it,” he said. There have been scattered reports across the country of debris falling to Earth since the Russian and U.S. satellites collided Tuesday about 500 miles above Earth. The collision occurred over Siberia and sheared thousands of shards of debris through Earth’s orbit.Pieces of that debris will continue to float through orbit for thousands of years or more, while other pieces will at times fall to Earth, probably likely burning up as they pass through the atmosphere, experts say.

Staff writer Jeff Mosier and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

SOURCE: http://www.quickdfw.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/021609dnmetdebris.1c083e1f.html

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Update 16FEB09:

Limestone County sheriff's office reported contact from someone who claimed to have a picture of the fireball and a smoke trail and a Plano,Texas, police cruiser may have capture images from a dashboard camera.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0902/15debris/

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Date: Monday, February 16, 2009, 6:44 PM

What must be sonic booms were reported in Hill and Navarro counties, south of Dallas, Texas. Two towns named in one TV story (a Fox station in the Dallas, Texas, area) where sonic booms were heard were Hubbard and Penelope.

One private report I've seen mentions what I guess was a smoke trail that lasted about ten minutes. That report said the fireball was visible for about eight seconds and that it was going south to north when seen to the east of Austin. Another report from people who apparently were in a car says they saw going NNE while they were traveling northeast.

This was a significant fireball, and I hope another video was made from somewhere. I saw a mention that a police-car dashboard camera may have captured it. This was at 11:00 AM local time -- broad daylight. By the way, online reports now cite the FAA and STRATCOM as saying it was a nature event completely unrelated to the collision of the satellites. I would tend to thank that this might have been detected by a DSP satellite, but if so we might never hear about it.

Source: Ed Cannon - Austin, Texas, USA

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Other Report:

Astronomer Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office is stating that this event was asteroid of about 1 meter, 20 Km/s.

Source: Space weather.

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UPDATE 17FEB09

Two local TV weather blogs have radar images from 11:03 AM (local, 17:03 UTC) Sunday that show two echoes, one in southern Hill County near Hubbard and another, larger one in the northern corner of McLennan County (Waco), just north of the small town of West and south of the small town of Abbott in Hill County.

They both agree that in one pair of images from Fort Worth radar the right-hand or eastern echo is higher in the atmosphere than the larger one to its left. They say that the one of the left was at about 4,000 feet and the one one the right at about 7,000 feet above the ground. I assume these are echoes of a smoke or debris trail, but maybe they could be plasma (?).

I don't know why there are two separate echoes. I believe that weather radars rotate once per minute. In the KVUE-24 blog, there are two pairs of images, each from a different radar center, and the altitudes of the echoes are given different altitudes for the Granger radar than for the radar from Fort Worth.

However, in this one it appears that the blogger or his source has mis-stated (reversed) the altitudes of the echoes in the second pair of images (from Granger radar).

Here are links:"Sunday Fireball Seen on Radar" (KXAN-36, NBC affiliate, Jim Spencer)http://blogs.kxan.com/weather/2009/02/16/sunday-fireball-seen-on-radar/

"Meteor Captured on Radar" (KVUE-24, ABCaffiliate, Mark Murray)http://www.beloblog.com/KVUE_Blogs/weatherblog/

Now, here is a second-hand report from an eyewitness in Hearne, Robertson County, Texas, who reports that the fireball went near the zenith, lasted about 10 seconds, and lit up the ground in broad daylight: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Feb-2009/0354.html

From Hearne to West in McLennan County yields a more or less SSE to NNW track, and the two radar echoes seem to have it descending as it went in that direction. I've read one report in which the eyewitness says she saw five streaks. Another story on one of those websites says that so many 911 calls were received in Williamson County (immediately north of Austin) that they sent out a helicopter to search for a fallen aircraft. It would be very nice, if this was detected by DSP satellite, if they would report it as has been done in the past (several years ago).

Ed Cannon - Austin, Texas, USA