Germany

Five new meteorites added

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Long overdue, I have added five more meteorites with photographic orbits recently published in the scientific literature. One is Aguas Zarcas (CM2), which was published by Jenniskens et al. 2025 in March of this year (available here). The other four (all ordinary chondrites: Haag (LL4-6; Austria), Pusté Úlany (H5; Slovakia), Renchen (L5-6; Germany) and Hradec Kralové (LL5; Czech Republic)) come from a compilation of 8 fireballs recorded by the European Fireball Network and with corresponding meteorites recovered in the last decade, by Spurný & Borovička 2025 (available here), in a contribution to this years’ MetSoc meeting (four of the meteorites were already part of the database – I will strive to add different orbit solutions by different authors in the next version of the website)   . This brings the total number of meteorites with published photographic orbits to 60.

Note 1: A nice review paper was published by Jenniskens & Devillepoix (2025) this spring. It contains a list of 75 meteorites with orbits, some from this compilation, and some others which I haven’t included so far as their orbit solutions are not published in the literature (yet, I hope). In the mean-time since publication of the review article, the list of meteorites with orbits has grown by the Haag (LL4-6) meteorite, also included in this update.

Note 2: for now, I will not further update the figures shown under “Plots”. The plan is to generate these automatically in the future.

Meteorite fragments of asteroid 2024 BX1 recovered nearby Berlin are aubrites

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On January 21st, 2024, a small (meter-sized) asteroid now designated 2024 BX1 and detected while still in space entered the Earth’s atmosphere near Berlin (Germany). Fragments of the corresponding meteorite have now been found and determined (by Peter Jenniskens and team) to belong to the rare group of aubrites (enstatite achondrites). This meteorite will certainly have an associated orbit and will be added to the list as soon as both its name (from the MetBull DB) and orbit are officially announced.

For more info, see the press release by the SETI institute.

Large fireball in North-Rhine-Westphalia (Germany)

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On March 2nd, ca. 23:38 UTC (0:38 local, i.e., CET), a large fireball was observed over North-West Germany, as the IMO (International Meteor Organization) reports. At an estimated diameter of 2 meters and a mass of about 10 tons (although this is contingent on the assumed entry velocity of 14 km/s and the assumed density of 3000 kg m3). At that size and relatively slow velocity, it seems plausible that some meteorites survived, but again, this depends on the assumptions made. Any meteorites would have fallen to the south-east of the city of Wesel on the Rhine.

Of course, there many meteors falling all the time, but this one seems very well observed (165 observations accross multiple countries!) and also relatively large; furthermore, there are several films of the meteor captured from multiple angles – so it seems likely that in this particular case, if any meteorites are found, they will have a very well-defined orbit. We’ll see if anything interesting (in terms of meteorites, of course!) comes from this – until then, that meteor goes to the candidate list. /m4