Statistical Approach to Estimate Initial Meteoroid Shape from Empirical Mass Distribution of Recovered Fragments.

We present a study on statistical approach to estimate initial meteoroid shape of the Sutter's Mill meteorite, aiming to fit lognormal, Weibull and Grady statistical mass distributions to the recovered fragments. We show a good correspondence of the selected distribution functions to the experimental data, with the best fit obtained with exponential cumulative distribution function (as a special case ofWeibull distribution). This allows us to implement a novel technique for meteoroid pre-entry shape estimation, based on the detailed data on surviving meteorite fragments recovered on the ground. In total, all the available 77 fragments of the Sutter's Mill meteorite were analyzed. This recovered fragment set is proved statistically complete. From the results obtained in this study, we suggest that only one major fragmentation event occurred during the atmospheric passage of the Sutter's Mill meteoroid. The scaling analysis reveals an elongated pre-fragmentation shape of the meteoroid, being an average between the known estimates for the shapes of the asteroids Castalia, Gaspra and Ausonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]