A team of six researchers and meteorite hunters led by co-authors Laurence Garvie and former graduate students Prajkta Mane and Daniel Dunlap of Arizona State University received permission from tribal elders to do so. Further down, the meteor flared at altitudes of 34, 29, and 25 km and left a spectacular dust train in the sky that was photographed, illuminated by the rising Sun.īecause they fell closer to the ground, the meteorites reflected Doppler weather radar signals as if there was a brief hail storm, telling scientists where to search. “This was particularly exciting because it was the first meteorite fall we captured with our cameras,” says Moskovitz.Īs the asteroid plunged through the atmosphere, it was spinning more than two times per second and a large fragment broke off at 44 km altitude. The bright meteor was filmed by the LO-CAMS low-light video camera network led by astronomer Nicholas Moskovitz of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. The Dishchii’bikoh fall was observed over much of Arizona around 3:56 AM on June 2, 2016. “Those asteroids had arrived on relatively short 2-year orbits around the Sun, taking slightly longer than it takes Mars to orbit the Sun, but shorter than most main belt asteroids.” “Prior to this fall, only three other LL chondrite falls had ever been photographed,” said Jenniskens. When these small asteroids collide with Earth’s atmosphere, they cause a bright meteor from which pieces survive sometimes and fall on the ground as meteorites. Occasional collisions with those family members eject rocks into orbit around the Sun. LL chondrites originate from somewhere in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where a parent body broke up and created a family of asteroids long ago. “We want to know where they originated because the damaging Chelyabinsk airburst of Februin Russia, was caused by a particularly large 20-meter sized LL chondrite.” “LL chondrites are fairly common meteorites with low-oxidized and low metallic (LL) iron content,” said Peter Jenniskens, the lead author and meteor astronomer with the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center. They report their results in the April 14 issue of Meteoritics and Planetary Science. The Dishchii’bikoh meteorite fall in the White Mountain Apache reservation in central Arizona has given scientists a big clue to finding out where so-called LL chondrites call home.
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