Roberto Gorelli points our attention at a recently published meteor related paper:

Consistency between dynamical modeling and photometrically derived masses of fireballs

This article has been submitted for publication by Eloy Peña-Asensio, Maria Gritsevich.

Abstract: We present a three-point inverse solution for reconstructing meteoroid deceleration and mass-loss histories from sparse observations constrained only by the entry, peak-brightness, and terminal points. The method combines the α–β analytical formalism with a derivative-free global optimizer and a numerical inversion of the height–velocity relation, enabling the retrieval of physically consistent solutions even when full velocity profiles are unavailable. Applied to the 2017–2018 European Fireball Network (EN) catalog, the approach achieves an 88% convergence rate when fitting only height–velocity pairs, and 63% when terminal and initial masses are also imposed. 52% of mass-constrained solutions (34% overall) yield bulk densities consistent with their PE classes, with higher strength emerging as the primary discriminator among events retaining coherent classifications when only 3 points are used as input data. Rapidly evolving high-energy, high-mass events show the largest incompatibility with the α–β model. The inversion produces a continuous bulk-density distribution spanning ∼300–4000 kgm−3, in contrast to the discrete densities fixed by PE-based categories. The EN fireball dataset is now supplemented with self-consistent α and β estimates.

You can download this paper for free: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.09452 (41 pages).

 

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