I happened to catch two parts of two different episodes of Meteorite Men - a show about two guys that look for meteorites. In both of the snippets I saw, they were talking about a debris field for a meteor that breaks up. In these fields, the larger chunks of the meteorite are further down in the field. Why is this?
Let me approach this first from a terminal velocity view. This requires a model for air resistance. I will use the following:
Where:
rho is the density of air
A is the cross sectional area of the object
C is a drag coefficient that depends on the shape of the object
v is…
Advertisment
