Speaker
Description
The European Fireball Network (EN) was officially established in 1968 after fireball stations in western Germany joined the Czechoslovak Fireball Network, which had been in operation since 1964. Various stations in countries of central and western Europe were used thorough the history of the network. The techniques developed from manually operated convex mirror cameras to current autonomous digital observatories, but all-sky photography remained the main tool. The headquarters have always been at the Ondřejov Observatory near Prague.
Currently, the core of the network consists of 16 stations in the Czech Republic, 4 in Slovakia, one in Austria and one in Germany. Apart for all-sky photography, also spectral photography, video observation covering 24 hours per day, and radiometric recording with 5000 samples per second are used. The Dutch Meteor Network in the Netherlands, Belgium, and northwestern Germany is officially associated with EN and uses similar techniques. The goal of the network is not to cover an enormously large territory and produce huge amount of data but to provide precise and complex characterization of fireballs of absolute magnitude –3 and brighter. The obtained data include trajectories, velocities, dynamics, photometry, orbits, fragment imaging, and spectra for bright fireballs. The data are used for modeling the meteoroid fragmentation and ablation in the atmosphere, deriving physical properties and composition of meteoroids, studying meteoroid streams and for other purposes. In rare cases resulting in meteorite falls, we determine the corresponding strewn field. More than ten different meteorites have been recovered in central Europe in the last decade thanks to the observations and computations by the EN team. The analysis of the fireball caused by the imminent impactor 2024 BX1 confirmed the reliability of the EN results, including the orbit, strewn field and in this case also the meteorite type inferred from fireball spectrum.