Meteoritics & Planetary Science 38, 975--987 (2003)

The Moravka meteorite fall:

1. Description of the events and determination of the fireball trajectory and orbit from video records

J. Borovicka¹, P. Spurny¹, P. Kalenda², and E. Tagliaferri³

¹Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences, 25165 Ondrejov, The Czech Republic
²CoalExp,Kosmonautu 2,70030 Ostrava 3, The Czech Republic
³ET Space Systems, 79Daily Drive, #159, Camarillo, CA, USA 93010

Abstract. The Moravka (Czech Republic) meteorite fall occurred on May 6, 2000, 11:52 UT, during daytime. Six H5-6 ordinary chondrites of total mass 1.4 kg were recovered. The corresponding fireball was witnessed by thousands of people and also videotaped by three casual witnesses. Sonic booms were recorded by 16 seismic stations in the Czech Republic and Poland and by one infrasonic station in Germany. A total of 2.5% of fireball eyewitnesses reported electrophonic sounds. Satellites in Earth orbit detected part of the fireball light curve.

In this first paper from a series of four papers devoted to the Moravka meteorite fall, we describe the circumstances of the fall anddetermine the fireball trajectory and orbit from calibrated video records. Moravka becomes one of only six meteorites with a known orbit. The slope of the trajectory was 20.4° to the horizontal; the initial velocity was 22.5 km/s, the terminal height of the fireball was 21 km. The semimajor axis of the orbit was 1.85 AU, perihelion distance 0.982 AU and inclination 32.2°. The fireball reached absolute visual magnitude of –20 at a height of 33 km.

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