Ménétréol-sur-Sauldre, France

Ménétréol-sur-Sauldre, France – Sunday, September 10, 2023,12:13 AM local time, A small meteor fireball was observed heading north at 17 km/s, and ending at a height of 22 km above the ground. The low speed of the meteor, visible fragmentation, end speed less than 5 km/s, and the low winds at the time of the fall would makes the search area quite narrow. However, the strewn field is mostly forest, with a few small fields, so the terrain is not ideal.

At least one meteorite has been found for this event! Link to story below!

News & Video

A 714 gram meteorite was recovered for this event on September 12th! The location of the find has not been released. Read the story on the Vigie Ciel website here:

Search Efforts

The location of the 714 gram meteorite (that broke on a table) was released on September 15th on the AstroSurf forum:

no more suspense or withholding information

Tioga Gulon, great specialist in video capture of BOAM meteors

and head of the Meteors division of MIMAS (Météors Impactisme Météories Scientific Association) filmed the bolide and calculated the attached trajectory

after investigation by MIMAS members, Stéphane went to the area

and had confirmation of the fall of the 714 g at Ménétréol sur Sauldre

it will therefore logically be called Ménétréol

“MARCOPOLE on AstroSurf

For more information on this and other falls, join the discussion on social media, by clicking the links below:

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StrewnLAB Maps & Data

Very accurate trajectory data for this event was published by FRIPON and was run through our StrewnLAB software to predict the search area shown below. Please download and review the Google Earth files below for detailed maps of the search area.

UPDATE 2023-09-12 15:37 UTC V2: Updated with the latest wind data and trajectory from FRIPON. Excellent precision on the trajectory and low wind created a very narrow search area. Forests will be an issue though.

UPDATE 2023-09-13 04:31 UTC V2.1: Same trajectory, with additional simulation time for better resolution. I found a typo mistake, the entry speed should be 17km/s instead of 14. I have restarted the simulation and should have a new map ready to post in the next 12 hours. Initial results don’t show a significant difference.

UPDATE 2023-09-13 12:57 UTC V3: Same trajectory, but with the correct entry speed of 17 km/s. Very similar results. I added an image of the general mass zones, but keep in mind there is a lot of overlap (for example, you could find a 10 gram fragment near a 100 gram fragment)

UPDATE 2023-09-17 03:25 UTC V5: I used Tioga’s trajectory, mentioned above, because it better matches the approximate reported location of the 714 gram specimen. I also found an error in my code that was limiting the wind variation. Full wind variation is now included (causing the effective search area to be wider). If the suspected location of the meteorite is accurate, one could assume that the west portion of the search area is less likely. I also experimented with Coriolis effect, but it didn’t seem to make much difference in my first attempt. This event would be worst case for Coriolis and that effect send the meteorites to the east, but maybe my first implementation didn’t work correctly. More to come on that later…

Weather Data

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 onthe drift of meteorites.

Jim Goodall

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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