Meteorites of bolide on February 17 at ~ 9:44:11 pm CST (UTC-6) have been found near Crosbyton, west of Lubbock, Texas, USA (updated: Feb. 29)
Last update (Feb. 29)
On February 29, 2016 Sonny Clary reported on his website * that Terry Scott and himself had found a 36.1 gram specimen in a cotton field near Crosbyton, Texas (~ 33°39’34.3″N 101°14’18.6″W).
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On February 25, 2016 Rob Matson reported on the meteorite-list that meteorites of the bolide above Texas (USA) on February 17, 2016 at 9:44:11 pm CST (UTC-6) have been found in the east of Lubbock in Texas (USA):
“Just want to report that the west Texas bolide that occurred one week ago on the evening of 17 February 2016 is officially a fall: the second
successful radar-enabled recovery of 2016 (following Osceola, Florida) as well as Texas’ second Doppler-cued recovery (the first of course being Ash Creek almost exactly seven years ago). Congratulations to the persistent meteorite recovery team who walked the many miles to make this another success story! –Rob” (Rob Matson)
[…]
“Some further information about the circumstances leading to the successful meteorite recovery east of Lubbock, TX. First off, Mike Hankey deserves special notice since often the first indication we have of a new potential fall is theAMS website that he maintains. Marc Fries was the first to spot the nice Lubbock radar returns for this fall — less than 18 hours after the event! I compiled those, and additional returns I found in the Amarillo radar, and then went on a search for seismic signatures or videos that could be used to pin down the time of the event. One Youtube video surfaced right away, taken from a dashcam on highway 183 near Euless, Texas:” (Rob Matson)
Bolide seen from 183 (westbound) in Euless (near Fort Worth) in Texas
“Pat Branch did some quick work measuring terminus angles, concluding that the vector lined up perfectly with the radar returns east of Lubbock. I soon located two more videos, one from some still undetermined location near Augusta, Kansas (east of Wichita) and some 580 km (!) from the fall:” (Rob Matson)
Recording from Augusta, Kansas
“and another from a dashcam near Edmond, Oklahoma (north of Oklahoma City)”
Recording from Edmond, Oklahoma (north of Oklahoma City)
“Pat Branch was successful in contacting the driver of this car who provided his exact location. There are numerous landmarks in this video that allowed me to determine reasonably accurate starting and ending directions. Triangulating this video with the one from Euless led to a fairly steep fireball entry angle and a nearly due west trajectory.
However, upper atmospheric winds were relatively strong (over 100 mph to the southeast,) and not surprisingly this is the trend we see in the radar returns. All that remained was to get an accurate time for the event so that meteorite masses could be estimated (based on the time delay between the fall and when various radar volumes were scanned). Unfortunately, none of the three videos above has a sufficiently accurate timetag.
But here again Pat came to the rescue. Rob Ferguson (the provider of the Edmond, OK dashcam) emailed Pat telling him that the fireball was also captured by the Oklahoma Dept. of Emergency Management’s tower cam, and that a friend of his (Putnam Reiter) works there and pulled the video for him. This has a great, unobstructed view of the event, being up on a tower some 200 feet! Most importantly, it has a very accurate timetag, being regularly synced with a NTP server. So we now knew the beginning of the event was at 3:44:08 UT (21:44:08 CST). I determined that the earliest radar returns of the fall were from Amarillo NEXRAD at 3:45:49.7, just 99 seconds after the beginning of dark flight (~21:44:11 UT). This was how we knew meteorites were on the ground for sure, since dust or even small pebbles can’t fall that far in less than 2 minutes.”
(Rob Matson)
