ON  A  POSSIBLE  RICOCHET  OF  THE 
TUNGUSKA  METEORITE

G. F. Plekhanov,   L. G. Plekhanova

3 pages, 1 scheme, 4  references.
Here are some excerpts  from the paper.
Full copy of the paper may be ordered from RIAP.

        Material remnants of the Tunguska meteorite (TM) have been looked for in vain during many years, both in the area of the Tunguska catastrophe and outside it.

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        <...>Its mass must have been of the order of a million tons. How could it disappear without trace? Let us re-analyze some data that can be found in the available literature, bringing together a few seemingly independent facts. These are: first, the information on a local earthquake at the Greater Pit river [1]; second, unpublished reports of some eyewitnesses who saw a bolide fly at Baykit (310 km to the WNW from the epicenter of the Tunguska explosion) in the morning of June 30, 1908; and third, the scheme of interpolation values of the field of deviations of the mean directions of the leveled trees from a radial pattern (see Fig. 1, borrowed from Ref. 2).

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        A second peculiarity of the scheme presented in Fig. 1 was indicated by V.G.Fast as early as 1967. It lies in the fact that the vector field of the tree leveling is as if twisted clockwise up to 3.3<198>. There is no definite explanation of this effect as yet. Attempts to associate it with the Coriolis acceleration, or with a change in the TM path of flight remain unproved. But this strange “vortex” does exist.  <...>

        Such deviations, located in the eastern part of the leveled forest area were more than once interpreted as a trace of the joint action of the ballistic shock wave and the blast wave (or as a trace of the ballistic shock wave only, if the body moved in a steep path and the intensity of the wave increased at the final stage of its flight). Then the similar (even if less distinct) deviations from the strict radial pattern existing in the western part of the area can be explained in a similar way: as a trace of the ballistic shock wave. But from which body it came? The Tunguska meteorite itself is supposed to explode having not reached the western quadrants of the map. Therefore these might be either powerful air streams that had accompanied the TM in its motion through the atmosphere, or a part of the meteorite that had survived the explosion, or, at last, the meteorite itself (contrary to the popular belief). The air streams are not a compact body and they could hardly generate a ballistic shock wave that deflected falling trees at a distance of up to 20 km. Therefore the meteorite (or a piece of it) had, in addition to the falling branch of its trajectory (in the eastern part of the leveled forest area) the ascending one as well (in the western part of the area). This may be interpreted as a ricochet of the meteorite body.

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To download RB, Vol. 4, No. 1-2, containing a full text of this paper, please click here:
http://www.geocities.com/riap777/EPRB-412.pdf (502 KB)

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