Pat Branch with his 419g encrusted individual
Junction City, Georgia, USA – September 26, 2022, 12:04 AM local time, cameras belonging to the American Meteor Society and the NASA ASGARD Networks detected a meteor fireball over western Georgia, coming in at a steep angle ovewr Junction City.
Meteorites were located two days later by Pat Branc, using AMS camera and Doppler data. Jim Goodall at Strewnify was able to match the find locations, using the trajectory provided by NASA. Refer to the sections below for details and search maps, which you can download to Google Earth.
| Entry Date/Time: | 2022-09-26 04:04:48 UTC |
| End Location: | 76 km WSW of Macon, Georgia |
| Endpoint Coordinates: | 32.604°N, 84.4548°W |
| Reference Altitude: | 26.92 km above sea level |
| Energy / Mass Estimate: | < 1 tonne TNT / < 25 kg |
| Reference Speed: | 11.88 km/s |
| Bearing: | 353.0° N |
| Slope: | 16.8° from vertical |
| TKW: | 0.98 kg |
| Estimated Strewn Mass: | < 4 kg |
| Classification: | likely H Chondrite |
| Event Links: | AMS Event 6491-2022 |
At least one video of the event was captured and posted online.
As Hurricane Ian makes landfall on the Florida coast, a new meteorite has made landfall in western Georgia! Pat Branch made the first finds on Wednesday, September 28th, a 419 gram encrusted individual and a 230 gram stone fractured on the road into many pieces. The material appears to be H Chondrite, similar to Chelyabinsk and Ash Creek.
Over the next few days, meteorite hunters descended on Junction City, despite the impending hurricane and several more specimens were located and the search continues.
For more live information on this event and the ongoing search, visit these social media pages.
Join the Strewnify Eastern USA Facebook Group!
Trajectory data provided by NASA was run through the StrewnLAB software to predict a search area. Please download and review the Google Earth files below for detailed maps of the search area.
The weather data below is sourced from weather balloons, and publicly available via NOAA’s Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA). This data is downloaded and post-processed by the StrewnLAB algorithm, to account for changing weather patterns and weather balloon drift. The plots have altitude on the y-axis, in kilometers above sea level. The wind speed below 10km has large effect on the drift of meteorites.
The author and founder of Strewnify.com, an automotive controls engineer, with a passion for physics.
Hancock, Michigan, USA | james.a.goodall@gmail.com | +1 586 709 5888
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