Generous grant from Richard King Mellon Foundation to fund establishment and operation of a third instrument station in Pennsylvania

CAMBRIDGE, MA/PITTSBURGH, PA — April 26, 2024 — The Galileo Project at Harvard University is thrilled to announce a generous grant of $575,000 from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. This grant will support the Galileo Project’s endeavor to establish a third observatory station, to be located in either Allegheny or Westmoreland County in Pennsylvania.

The grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation will...

In a recent preprint, Fernando et al. (2024) used public data from infrasound stations to constrain the localization of the fireball of the CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1) bolide. The analysis inferred a 90%-confidence ellipse with semi-minor and semi- major axes of 186 and 388 km, respectively. This large error ellipse includes the much better localization box derived by sensors aboard U.S. Government satellites which detected the fireball light. At the fireball’s peak brightness, the CNEOS localization box documented by NASA/JPL measures 11.112 km on a side and is centered on a latitude of 1.3...

New paper proposes violent beginnings for high-velocity interstellar meteors such as IM1

HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE, MA — March 10, 2024 — The Galileo Project at Harvard University announced the publication of the latest paper to emerge from the IM1 meteor retrieval expedition off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the new paper describes a process by which extraordinary tidal...