Stable flight of meteors

The atmospheric erosion of meteors is a splendid example of the reshaping of a solid object due to its motion through a fluid. Motivated by meteorite samples collected on Earth that suggest fixed orientation during flight--most notably the strikingly conical shape of so called oriented meteorite--here the hypothesis that such forms result from an aerodynamic stabilization of posture that may be achieved only by specific shapes, is explored. The laboratory- scale experiment is conducted for exploring systematic static stability tests on cones of varying apex angles in fast flows, and the resulting map of the orientational equilibria and their stability. A 2D mathematical model has been developed, and is compared with the experimental results. Armed with the simplified 2D model of oriented meteorites (with a conical shape), an isosceles triangle is considered in order to calculate its flow wake structure using free streamline theory and conclude that meteors are self-stabilizing in the sense that they seem to reshape themselves through erosion into a flight-stable form.