Airborne observations of an asteroid entry for high fidelity modeling

The observing campaign on the deep-space debris WT1190F as a test case for short-warning NEO impacts

“…Another important component of any effort to characterize hazardous objects approaching Earth relies on ground-based lightcurve photometry, useful to determine the rotational period of the body, which in turn may provide another clue on its 2 It is important to point out that, due to the moderately steep incident angle of ∼ 20°, WT1190F behaved far more like an asteroid than a man-made spacecraft in its atmosphere re-entry. The object actually approached Earth at a 10.6 km s −1 velocity, thus crossing our atmosphere in some ∼ 10 s (Jenniskens et al, 2016). As consequence of the limited aerodynamic drag interval the true impact point should have expected to be earlier along the track than predicted by a purely ballistic model, but not too significantly so.…”

“…It is just worth stressing here that a fast-spinning body could more likely survive the atmosphere entry event allowing heat to be more easily dissipated, such as to avoid (or limit) any body disruption/fragmentation. These arguments actually led Jenniskens et al (2016) to conclude that about two thirds of WT1190F's entire mass may have safely arrived at the ground, impacting the sea still at supersonic speed.…”

“…In addition to the observational results presented above, our team of the SSA-NEO Program was also able to provide funding for two European researchers (Stefan Löhle and Fabian Zander of the University of Stuttgart) to participate in the international airborne observation campaign sponsored by the International Astronomical Center in Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency, which flew over the impact location in Sri Lanka and directly observed the re-entry. A full report of this mission and the relevant results has been presented by Jenniskens et al (2016).…”

Extension of the plasma radiation database PARADE for the analysis of meteor spectra

“…These observed entries provide test cases for the comparison of molecular radiation (Jenniskens et al. 2016; Loehle et al. 2017b).…”

“…The object WT1190F was a piece of space debris which returned to Earth on an eccentric orbit with an entry speed of 10.61 km s −1 at an entry angle of 20.6◦ (Jenniskens et al. 2016). These entry conditions are more similar to asteroid impacts than most usual space debris impacts from typically low Earth orbits.…”