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[Centaur]

Aldo Vitagliano, the creator of the Solex astronomical numerical integration program, has provided me with position and velocity data to be entered into Solex for the Chelyabinsk meteor that struck Russia on 2013 FEB 15. This allowed me to create an “overhead” diagram of the intersecting orbits of the Earth and meteor as viewed from far north of the Sun. It can be seen at the bottom of my asteroids webpage CurtRenz.com/asteroids.html

[Paulie pchris00]

How certain is that orbit? Was it calculated from just video footage, or has anybody gone back and found the meteor in photographs after the fact? I'm just curious, and not really expecting anybody to know. Those are just questions that came to mind.

[Centaur]

Mar 7, 2013 22:37:13 GMT -6 Paulie pchris00 said:

How certain is that orbit? Was it calculated from just video footage, or has anybody gone back and found the meteor in photographs after the fact? I'm just curious, and not really expecting anybody to know. Those are just questions that came to mind.

Good questions, Paulie. Aldo may know the answers. I believe he gets the raw data from NEODyS. I suspect they’re derived from the photographs and videos of the meteor in the atmosphere. As far as I know, the rather tiny “asteroid” was not visible or photographed beforehand. Perhaps I'm wrong.

Aldo actually supplied me with parameters for many possible clones of the comet within the range of reasonable error, but I drew the chart based on only the nominal solution.