Abstract-In this study, we conduct a detailed analysis of the Ko sice meteorite fall (February 28, 2010), to derive a reliable law describing the mass distribution among the recovered fragments. In total, 218 fragments of the Ko sice meteorite, with a total mass of 11.285 kg, were analyzed. Bimodal Weibull, bimodal Grady, and bimodal lognormal distributions are found to be the most appropriate for describing the Ko sice fragmentation process. Based on the assumption of bimodal lognormal, bimodal Grady, bimodal sequential, and bimodal Weibull fragmentation distributions, we suggest that, prior to further extensive fragmentation in the lower atmosphere, the Ko sice meteoroid was initially represented by two independent pieces with cumulative residual masses of approximately 2 and 9 kg, respectively. The smaller piece produced about 2 kg of multiple lightweight meteorite fragments with the mean around 12 g. The larger one resulted in 9 kg of meteorite fragments, recovered on the ground, including the two heaviest pieces of 2.374 kg and 2.167 kg with the mean around 140 g. Based on our investigations, we conclude that two to three larger fragments of 500-1000 g each should exist, but were either not recovered or not reported by illegal meteorite hunters.
This paper is concerned with a meteoroid shape estimation technique based on statistical laws of distribution for fragment masses. The idea is derived from the experiments that show that brittle fracturing produces multiple fragments of size lesser than or equal to the least dimension of the body. The number of fragments depends on fragment masses as a power law with exponential cutoff. The scaling exponent essentially indicates the initial form of the fragmented body. We apply the technique of scaling analysis to the empirical data on the mass distributions for Košice, Almahata Sitta and Bassikounou meteorites.
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