Bowling Ball Dropped From Airplane Simulates Meteor Impact  

On Feb. 13, a single-engine Cessna flew low over the Utah desert toward the Bonneville Seabase at 80 knots. Pilot Patrick Wiggins checked his altimeter. As planned, he was just 820 feet (250 meters) above the surface. The mission's bombardier, Ann House, readied a 14-pound (6.5-kilogram) bowling ball in her lap and opened the right-side window. This was a test to see if she could safely manage getting the ball out the window. Wiggins called on the radio to make sure nobody was in the drop zone. Then she opened the window and threw the ball out.

At the point began an offbeat effort -- equal parts science and thrill seeking -- to learn what happens when space rocks hit the ground. Do they bounce, stick or disappear? Nobody knows. An answer would help meteorite hunters figure out where and how to search for extraterrestrial material that rains down on the planet daily."It's perfectly legal, as long as you make sure nobody is going to get hurt," Wiggins told the Associated Press in a telephone interview last week after a night spent in his backyard observatory. "Admittedly there is an element of fun. I'm not going to deny that."

Wiggins is a volunteer "solar system ambassador" for NASA, working to spread good words about astronomy and the space program. But his colleagues -- other amateur astronomers and meteorite hunters with the Salt Lake Astronomical Society -- say he's involved in the current project more for the excitement of throwing things out of airplanes. Indeed, next time Wiggins wants to don a parachute and jump out of the plane along with the bowling ball.

Hyatt and others at the Salt Lake Astronomical Society think Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats -- a vast, dead, unchanging white sea of nothingness -- should be a good place to search for small, dark extraterrestrial rocks that have survived plunges through the atmosphere. Preliminary rough searches of the salt flats, however, have not turned up much. Yet meteorites have been found in dry lakebeds elsewhere in Utah and in California, and also on the permanent ice of the arctic. The bowling ball drop was the first of many planned schemes to understand what happens when falling objects hit the ground. "If we determine it's going to bury in mud or punch through salt, then it might be a fruitless search," Hyatt said.

FMI: www.nasa.gov