2024 BX1 and the Ribbeck Meteorite Fall

Abstract

In the evening of Jan 20, 2024, Hungarian astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky discovered a small asteroid. It quickly became clear that this is an extraordinary object, since it was on collision course with Earth. Just before midnight is was announced in social media, that on January 21, at 1:32, the rock from space would enter the Earth atmosphere just west of Berlin, and produce a dazzling fireball. In the first part of the talk we will present, how we got notified of the events and what we did in the remaining hours till impact. We will describe what happened thereafter and how we managed to gather just 13.5 hours later near the impact point for a first for meteorite hunt. The second part of the talk will describe the details of the meteorite search, the lessons we learned, and how we managed to obtain the best-documented meteorite-strewn field ever.

Short bios

Sirko Molau became a star gazer and amateur astronomer at the age of 15, when he joined a youth club at public Archenhold Observatory in Berlin. One year later he conducted his first meteor observation – a topic which has fascinated him till then. In 1992 he used for the first time a video camera to record meteors. In 1997 he became head of Arbeitskreis Meteore e.V., a German society for observers of atmospheric phenomena, and has remained bord member or head of organization till then. In 1999 he started the world-wide first video network to record meteors permanently, which is still in operation today. Over the time the network has grown to more than 80 cameras recording the sky in about a dozen of countries. In 2018 he started his latest project and arranged the AllSky7 Fireball Network Europe, a network of meanwhile a hundred all-sky cameras that are recording the skies 24/7. This network has already captured numerous fireballs and a few meteorite falls, including Ribbeck.

Andreas Möller is a member of the Arbeitskreis Meteore e.V. and is passionate about atmospheric phenomena, especially auroras. Over the years, he has built a well known website for aurora prediciton in Germany www.polarlicht-vorhersage.de as well as the Aurora Archive. In his free time, he travels the world to photograph breathtaking landscapes and observe total solar eclipses.

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