{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/decameter-sized-earth-impactors-i-orbital","title":"Decameter-sized Earth impactors -- I: Orbital properties","arxiv_id":"2501.03308","date":"2025-01-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ian Chow","Peter G. Brown"],"abstract":"Numerous decameter-sized asteroids have been observed impacting Earth as fireballs. These objects can have impact energies equivalent to hundreds of kilotons of TNT, posing a hazard if they impact populated areas. Previous estimates of meteoroid flux using fireball observations have shown an Earth impact rate for decameter-size objects of about once every $2$-$3$ years. In contrast, telescopic estimates of the near-Earth asteroid population predict the impact rate of such objects to be of order $20$-$40$ years, an order-of-magnitude difference. While the cause of this discrepancy remains unclear, tidal disruption of a larger near-Earth body has been proposed as an explanation for these excess decameter-sized impactors. The release in 2022 of previously classified United States Government (USG) satellite sensor data for fireball events has provided a wealth of new information on many of these impacts. Using this newly available USG sensor data, we present the first population-level study characterizing the orbital and dynamical properties of 14 decameter-sized Earth impactors detected by USG sensors since 1994, with a particular focus on searching for evidence of tidal disruption as the cause of the impact rate discrepancy. We find there is no evidence for recent ($\\lesssim 10^4$ years) tidal disruption and weak evidence for longer-term tidal disruption in the decameter impactor population, but that the latter conclusion is limited by small number statistics. We also investigate the origins of both the impactor and near-Earth asteroid populations of decameter-sized objects from the main asteroid belt. We find that both populations generally originate from the same source regions: primarily from the $\\nu_6$ secular resonance ($\\sim70$%) with small contributions from the Hungaria group ($\\sim20$%) and the 3:1 Jupiter mean-motion resonance ($\\sim10$%).","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03308v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03308v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"decameter-sized-earth-impactors-i-orbital","repo_url":"https://github.com/wmpg/fasano-franceschini-test","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}