The Dingle Dell meteorite: a Halloween treat from the Main Belt

Abstract

We describe the fall of the Dingle Dell (L/LL 5) meteorite near Morawa in Western Australia on October 31, 2016. The fireball was observed by six observatories of the Desert Fireball Network (DFN), a continental scale facility optimised to recover meteorites and calculate their pre-entry orbits. The $30\,\mbox{cm}$ meteoroid entered at 15.44 $\mbox{km s}^{-1}$, followed a moderately steep trajectory of $51^{\circ }$ to the horizon from 81 km down to 19 km altitude, where the luminous flight ended at a speed of 3.2 $\mbox{km s}^{-1}$. Deceleration data indicated one large fragment had made it to the ground. The four person search team recovered a 1.15 kg meteorite within 130 m of the predicted fall line, after 8 hours of searching, 6 days after the fall. Dingle Dell is the fourth meteorite recovered by the DFN in Australia, but the first before any rain had contaminated the sample. By numerical integration over 1 Ma, we show that Dingle Dell was most likely ejected from the main belt by the 3:1 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter, with only a marginal chance that it came from the $n{u}_6$ resonance. This makes the connection of Dingle Dell to the Flora family (currently thought to be the origin of LL chondrites) unlikely.

arXiv comment23 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in MAPS (MAPS-2892)

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