Record meteorite hits Norway

Annual Arietid meteor - 06-08-2006

DAYLIGHT METEORS: There's a meteor shower in progress today--but don't expect to see any meteors. The display peaks in broad daylight. The annual Arietid meteor shower emerges from a point in the sky only 30 degrees from the sun. These meteors are thought to be debris from the sungrazing asteroid Icarus.

Arietid meteoroids hit Earth's atmosphere with a velocity of 39 km/s (87,000 mph). No one is sure where these meteoroids come from, although some astronomers suspect they are debris from the sungrazing asteroid 1566 Icarus.

The debris stream is quite broad: Earth is in it from late May until early July. In most years, the shower peaks on June 8th.

During one hour on the morning of June 2, 1973, John West (Bryan, Texas) observed four Arietids.

Various researchers have arrived at some interesting conclusions concerning links between this stream and other solar system bodies. In 1951, while obtaining the first determination of this stream's orbit, Almond concluded that another shower should be encountered as Earth crossed the stream's orbital plane on July 28. The estimated radiant position was RA=336 deg, DECL=-11 deg, which falls within 15 deg of the position of the Southern Delta Aquarid meteor stream. After examining both stream orbits, Almond concluded that, although the orbits "are now different, it seems probable that they may have had a common origin in the past."

In articles published during 1973 and 1976, Zdenek Sekanina suggested several possible associations of meteor streams with comets and asteroids. For the Arietids, he noted that the Apollo asteroid Icarus (1566) possessed an orbit with similar characteristics.

NASA says comet fragments won't hit Earth
(Apr 28, 2006)

Chunks of a comet currently splitting into pieces in the night sky will not strike the Earth next month, nor will it spawn killer tsunamis and mass extinctions, NASA officials said Thursday. The announcement, NASA hopes, will squash rumors that a fragment of the crumbling Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (SW 3) will slam into Earth just before Memorial Day. “There are some Internet stories going around that there’s going to be an impact on May 25,” NASA spokesperson Grey Hautaluoma, told SPACE.com.