8 Dark flight

The Earth's grazing trajectory is extremely unfavorable for computing dark-flight distances and for predicting of an impact area of meteorites. Thus we limited us only to rather schematic computations without wind field being included. The computation of the dark-flight started at point denoted "end" in Table 4, at which the azimuth of the radiant (instantaneous motion and horizon) was $339.02^\circ$ and the zenith distance of the radiant was $86.94^\circ$. The equations of motion are those given in Ceplecha et al. (1998), pages 320-322. The results are given in Table 6 for three masses representing a mass range of possible meteorites. The many tens of kilometers long dark-flight distances and the uncertainties of the trajectory slope define a very large impact area, which is given as being 11 km to both sides of the line in Table 6. Thus the predicted impact area is a 22 km wide and about 46 km long stripe symmetrically to the line of Table 6.

  

Table 6: Geographical coordinates of impact points for different masses, $m_{\rm E}$. Notation: L is the horizontal dark-flight distance starting from point "end", T is the time interval from point "end" to the Earth's surface, and $v_{\rm s}$ is the impact velocity