L-chondrite

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.

I somehow missed Ozerki (L6)

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Many meteorites with the potential for a photographic orbit have fallen since I started this page. They all go into my candidate list, and I regularly check whether any of them have been published in the mean-time. However, the process is not perfect, as the case of Ozerki demonstrates: Ozerki is an L6 that fell in June 2018 in Russia. Its orbital elements have been published by Kartashova et al. in 2020 in Planetary and Space Science, and yet, I never stumbled over the paper. Anyway, Ozerki is in the database now. If you know of any other meteorites that I missed, please let me know.

Novo Mesto EPSC abstract published

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Vida et al. have published an abstract (PDF) to the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) of 2021 where they give the orbital parameters for Novo Mesto, an L5 chondrite with a photographic orbit which fell in Slovenia in February 2020. This is enough for inclusion in our list of published meteorite orbits, and a corresponding entry has been added. In total, there are now 38 meteorites with published orbital elements derived from photographic documentation.

To answer a related frequently asked question, I am aware that there are a number of recently fallen meteorites for which it is known that orbital elements were determined based on photographic documentation of the entry fireball – however, the orbital elements for these meteorite orbits are not currently available in the scientific literature because the authors chose not to add them to an abstract where they announced the publication of an orbit solution, or just haven’t published them yet in a regular journal article. If you find an abstract or article reporting orbital elements for a meteorite currently not listed, please let me know. /m4

New papers out: Žďár nad Sázavou in MAPS and Porangaba in Icarus

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Spurný et al. report in a new paper in MAPS on the fireball trajectory, orbit and meteorite recovery of the Žďár nad Sázavou (L3.9) meteorite, which fell in the Czech Republic on December 9th, 2014. This is the first unequilibrated ordinary chondrite with an orbit. The orbit has been in the database since 2016 because it was published in a MetSoc (Berlin) abstract by Spurný et al., 2016, now superseded by the peer-reviewed paper. The changes in the orbital parameters given in the paper, relative to the ones given in the abstract, are marginal, but I updated the list nevertheless.

Ferus et al. report in a new paper in Icarus on the trajectory, orbit and meteorite recovery of the Porangaba (L4) meteorite, which fell in Brazil just one month after the fall of Žďár nad Sázavou, on January 9th, 2015. Using two pictures of the dust trail, as well as some security camera footage allowed the authors to derive a set of orbital parameters, albeit with a comparatively large uncertainty. But since there is a closed orbital solution (unlike, e.g., to the somewhat similar case of the 1995 St. Robert meteorite), I have added the meteorite to the database. An interesting detail: the addition of Porangaba makes 2015 the first year from which (at least) four meteorite falls with orbits are known. Compare this with the fact that it took 33 years for the first four orbits…

I have updated the fall statistics and orbit plots, which now include the most recent falls including Porangaba. /m4