Howdy! Jim Gibson wrote:

When I click on your New York Times link, it takes me to a login page for members of which I am not one. Can you cut and paste the article here or at least give us some of the salient points?

Sure. See below. Patrick :-) Bowling Ball Simulates Meteorite Crater February 17, 2004 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 4:30 p.m. ET SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Some amateur astronomers were glad they didn't come up with a gutter ball when they went bowling for meteorite craters. Amateur meteorite hunters successfully dropped a bowling ball out of the sky Friday in the first of a series of experiments they hope will help them identify meteorite craters in the Utah desert. Two researchers hurled a 14-pound, red-swirl bowling ball out the window of a rented Cessna light plane from 820 feet above the desert near Grantsville. Patrick Wiggins said the test, which saw the ball sink halfway into the frozen clay, reaped important data. The impact sprayed ``ejecta'' in a single direction, indicating the ball had retained forward velocity. ``Now we know what a frozen clay surface might be like'' if struck by a meteorite, Wiggins said. The plan is to keep dropping objects, maybe rocks and iron or slag that more closely simulate meteorites. The experimenters also want to try different altitudes, but they believe it won't be necessary to soar to great heights for their tests. After falling a certain distance, an object stops accelerating because of air resistance. So higher won't get it dropping faster. ``Next time, we are going to go a bit higher. We are trying to get where it will fall straight down, as a meteorite would,'' Wiggins said, but most important, ``the test showed we could do this without hurting anybody.'' Federal Bureau of Land Management officials were uneasy about the test, worried that the experiments could endanger the people, animals, weather stations, land-speed record setters and automobile commercial filmmakers indigenous to the Salt Flats. To sidestep BLM red tape for the first test, Wiggins got permission to drop the ball on private property owned by Bonneville Seabase, a scuba diving facility at spring-fed ponds in Tooele County. He also consulted Federal Aviation Administration officials to confirm the flight would not violate any rules. ------

I exchanged emails with a guy at JPL and my understanding now is that only large meteors will retain some of their cosmic energy all the way to the ground. The smallish ones, like we might expect to find, loose their cosmic energy and by the time they reach the ground they are falling at terminal velocity and pretty much vertical. Regarding the 1993 Peekskill fall, the reports I've read say the 12 kg meteor didn't go very far into the ground. It was said to have been found in a "shallow depression" under the car. "Don J. Colton" wrote:

Not to put a damper on the bowling ball drop, but I am not sure that the bowling ball going at terminal velocity actually simulates the speed of a meteorite. A large meteorite that hits the atmosphere at 60,000 miles per hour would probably ionize all the gases in front of it reducing the air resistance and depending on the size of the object and its ability to transfer momentum to the atmosphere could still hit the earth at a speed in excess of several thousand miles per hour causing the equivalent of a small nuclear explosion. In New York a small meteorite hit the back of a car and drilled a hole right through the car and several feet into the ground. I expect it was traveling faster than the terminal velocity that would result from dropping it out of an airplane.i