Large Meteoroid Fragmentation: Modeling the Interaction of the Chelyabinsk Meteoroid with the Atmosphere

The interaction between a large meteoroid and the atmosphere is modeled as its destruction into a cloud of fragments and vapors moving with a common shock wave. Under the action of aerodynamic forces the shape of this cloud is deformed—it is expanded in the direction transverse to the motion and compressed in the longitudinal direction. With allowance for the pressure distribution over the surface of a body varying its shape (it is assumed that the sphere is transformed into a flattened spheroid), the relation for the rate of increase in the midsection radius of a fragmented meteoroid has been obtained. This rate significantly depends on the degree of the meteoroid flattening which leads to a significantly smaller increase in the transverse size of the meteoroid along the trajectory as compared to similar models used in the literature where the influence of the body shape was not considered. The proposed model also takes into account the change in the density of the cloud of fragments due to an increase in gaps between them. An approximate analytical solution of equations of the physical theory of meteors with drag and heat transfer coefficients varying along the trajectory has been obtained for a fragmented meteoroid. The interaction of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid with the atmosphere is modeled and the solution obtained for the energy release curve is compared with the observational data.