Source regions for meteorite falls

Over the past decade there has been a large increase in the number of automated camera networks that monitor the sky for fireballs. One of the goals of these networks is to provide the necessary information for linking meteorites to their pre-impact, heliocentric orbits and ultimately to their source regions in the solar system. In 2018, we reported on the likely source regions for the 25 meteorite falls published in or before 2016 (Granvik and Brown 2018). Using heliocentric orbits that we systematically re-computed, we constrained their most likely escape routes from the main asteroid belt and the cometary region by utilizing a state-of-the-art orbit model of the near-Earth-object population (Granvik et al. 2016), which includes a size-dependence in delivery efficiency. Our results were largely in agreement with the probabilistic results reported later by Binzel et al. (2019). We will present updated results based on a new NEO model (Granvik et al. 2018) and complement our data set with the falls that have been reported since 2016.

1. Binzel, R. P. et al. (2019). “Compositional distributions and evolutionary processes for the near-Earth object population: Results from the MIT-Hawaii Near-Earth Object Spectroscopic Survey (MITHNEOS)”, Icarus 324, 41-76

2. Granvik, M. and Brown, P. (2018). “Identification of meteorite source regions in the Solar System”, Icarus 311, 271-287

3. Granvik, M. et al. (2016). “Super-catastrophic disruption of asteroids at small perihelion distances”, Nature 530, 303-306

4. Granvik, M. et al. (2018). “Debiased orbit and absolute-magnitude distributions for near-Earth objects”, Icarus 312, 181-207.