A valuable meteorite find near Flensburg
When the windows and doors of the author's house in Gettorf, around 20 kilometers north of Kiel, were shaken by a violent detonation shortly before 3 p.m would delve deeper into the cause.
On September 12, 2019, numerous people from the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and northern Germany saw a very bright luminous phenomenon in the afternoon sky at 14:49 CEST (see SuW 11/2019, p. 16). On the same day I received information from NASA that the instruments of the CNEOS system confirmed the entry of a small asteroid into the atmosphere, which burst in the process. CNEOS is the "Center for Near Earth Object Studies" at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The energy released was given as an equivalent explosion of about 480 tons of TNT. The speed of the entered celestial body was 18.5 kilometers per second, and the height of the explosion was 42 kilometers. Based on the usual average density of a stone meteorite of around three grams per cubic centimeter, the mass could be estimated at around twelve tons. This resulted in an original size of around two meters.
