I read one theory that the impactor came to a halt somewhere deep and
outside the edge of the crater rim and was why the drilling operation never
hit anything.
They, the Barringer family, had hoped to mine tons of iron and nickel but
being a bust they turned the site into a private park and since sell
tickets and stuff to tourists. The gift that keeps on giving.
Anyway, back to rockets, right?
Ken
On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 10:12 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Tue, 5 Oct 2021, roxanna Mason wrote:
On that note, I wonder what the impact velocity of the Nickel/Iron meteor
was that made the Barringer crater in Arizona.
It is thought to have been about a 45m object, 400,000t, hitting
atmosphere at about 17km/s. It partially broke up circa 14km up -- even
the strength of iron was greatly exceeded -- and only about half its mass
reached the surface more or less as a single lump, hitting the ground at
about 12km/s. Older models showed higher impact velocities, but struggle
to explain why there is so little impact melt in the crater, a result that
appears naturally with these numbers.
Caveat: the numbers are inference and modeling from limited evidence, not
constrained very tightly by the data. Planetary scientists are prone to
trying to extract lots of knowledge from meager data :-), and there are
sometimes major surprises when better data appears.
Henry