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First of all, a shooting star is a meteor, not a comet. So we can do better, we can recover individual meteorites themselves. A comet looks stationary in the s
by drjesusphd 8y ago
First of all, a shooting star is a meteor, not a comet. So we can do better, we can recover individual meteorites themselves.
A comet looks stationary in the sky when you see one, only moving noticeably day by day, like a fast planet.
- DoctorOetker 8y agoI knew a comet is not a meteorite, I just had the question lingering around in my head and was waiting for a tangentially related topic to pop up on HN, in the hopes that someone who knows would answer if or if not ever the spectrum of a shooting star aerobraking had been measured. I ask because the composition of what remains lumped together, and the actual physical finds of remains may not be representative of the bulk mass originally entering the atmosphere. So has distribution of optical spectra of shooting stars been measured? (this seems hard to me because one would need accurate tracking before it enters in order to aim the telescope+spectrometer in the right direction for the short duration it passes the atmosphere) The reason I ask is because I have an idea on how to try detecting very faint objects, which may nevertheless be dangerous as rare impacts, or valuable if it turns out the material would be valuable in bulk before it evaporates in the atmosphere..