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News briefs
Comet news: The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams is showing that the very unusual object 2003 WT42 has been caught exhibiting cometary activity, and has now been named and redesignated as C/2003 WT42 (LINEAR). A/CC's previous reports about this object and its orbit are now all out of date. See MPEC 2004-B02 for info current as of late on the 16th UT.
Spanish fireball by Marco Langbroek
On the Spanish SPMN Web site, the first trajectory results are now presented. They also provide some very interesting speculation about the possibility that this fireball might have moved in an orbit similar to that of the 3 January 1970 Lost City meteorite, an H5 chondrite. The still very preliminary results on the radiant position of the Spanish fireball appear to be somewhat similar to that of Lost City to some extent.
This report continue's A/CC's long news thread about the January 4th bolide.
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More meteor news: The Cleveland, Ohio Plain Dealer has an article today [link expired], "Cleveland geologist's cool job: finding bits of Mars on Earth," about Ralph Harvey of Case Western Reserve University, leader of ANSMET meteorite expeditions.
“ This year's Antarctic search [combing] the LaPaz ice field 217 miles northwest of the South Pole Station [has yielded] 655 meteorite samples as of last Saturday. One of the best finds was a 50-pound basketball-sized specimen whose interior was flecked with chondrules — distinctive round deposits that are some of the first solids to appear as dust coalesced into our solar system. ”
A New Indian Express article, "Why NASA scientists visited Nagpur before Mars mission," tells about the visit of Horton Newsom of the University of New Mexico to study "one of only two impact craters created by a meteor strike on basaltic land, which is located at Lonar in Maharashtra," thus one of the closest analogs to craters on Mars. It also tells about the need to protect this "50,000-year old, 1.8-km diameter crater" by declaring it a World Heritage site.
See the Lonar Crater Web site for more info.
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