“Here in Florida you have all this moisture and salty air, and humidity, etc, so these stones, they hit the ground, they punch in, and then you get a couple of rains, and they just go deeper,” he said. They immediately start to terrestrialize when they hit the Earth. When meteorites reach Earth, it's a very hostile environment. It's probably one of the worst places in this country to look for a meteorite. Florida is kind of an inhospitable place. “All we had was the radar data to go by, so it's still a needle in a thousand haystacks to find a single stone. "This particular meteorite was exceptionally difficult to recover because there were no people out there. In fact, it was so swampy, five out of the six stones were actually found in the roads, because the prospect of hunting in the swamp is not good." "It was in the Osceola National Forest, approximately halfway between Sanderson and Lake City,” Atkins said. That's the hard way."Ītkins, Hankey and a team of assembled meteorite hunters set out to try to find where the fireball might have landed. In the old days, before Doppler radar, a meteorite hunter would have to go out and interview literally hundreds of witnesses, and then triangulate based on eyewitnesses from different locations and try to get a trajectory to go out and try to find the rock. We've got Doppler radar, multiple witnesses, this makes the search a lot easier. “This is the scenario you are looking for. Once I had all the information, I knew exactly where to go,” Atkins said. "He went ahead and sent me the Doppler radar and the AMS reports. He had over 80 reported sightings and images from Doppler radar showing the space rocks over the Osceola National Forest. Hankey did have good data on the fireball. “I immediately heard about it, because I keep in touch with these types of things, and so I got in the car the next day and started driving, and on my way up, I called Mike Hankey and asked him if he had any good data on it." "Basically, I was on vacation in Palmetto, Florida, and just by chance there was a fireball here,” Atkins said. When reports of the fireball started rolling in to The American Meteor Society, meteorite hunter Larry Atkins happened to be on vacation in Florida, visiting his father. Occasionally, the meteoroid is large enough to make it to the surface of the Earth, at which time it is called a meteorite. Most meteoroids that enter the atmosphere disintegrate during the process. 24 caught the attention of The American Meteor Society - and some lucky meteorite hunters.Ī meteoroid entered the atmosphere at 10:30 a.m., and a combination of friction, pressure and chemical reactions caused gases to heat up and expand, creating a fireball. – A fireball that blazed across the skies of northern Florida on Jan.
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