American Meteor Society
The AMS and its partners PRISMA (Italy) and the IMO (Intl) have received about 50 reports about of a bright fireball seen above the Province of Modena (North of Italy) on Wednesday, January 1st 2020 around 18:25 Universal Time.
If you witnessed this event and/or if you have a video or a photo of this event, please
Submit an Official Fireball Report
(in Italian, in French)
If you want to learn more about Fireballs: read our Fireball FAQ.
Based on these reports, we were able to compute a first estimation of the ground trajectory of the event. As seen above, this estimated trajectory ends up over the city of Montalbano in the Province of Modena.
Luckily, the event has been caught on the PRISMA fireball network (part of the French FRIPON/Vigie-Ciel Fireball Network). Thanks to the data obtained from the camera detection, the FRIPON/Vigie-Ciel team was able to determined that the pre-atmospheric object was about 8kg (~17.6lbs) and the initial velocity of this object was around 12 km/s (which is pretty slow for this kind of event). So far, two 55g meteorite have been recovered.
More info in Italian and in French.
That’s a great result ! Nice to see that it’s still possible to discover some meteorites in our crowded world.
Michel
Dear Vincent,
just a small clarification to your article,
the PRISMA team was able to perform its own computations to determine the research area and recover the meteorite fragments thanks to the alert given to local citizens.
In fact PRISMA and FRIPON are collaborating networks both part of a wider european network. Regards
Daniele Gardiol – Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, National Coordinator of the PRISMA network.
.
Very cool observation, and it is always fascinating to see the re entry calculations. Even better is that not one but two pieces have been located so far. Outstanding teamwork makes this possible.