🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bx1pK6.MEC.1@cs.cmu.edu> REIFF@spacvax.rice.edu ("Patricia Reiff (713")) writes:
>In a recent SD, pgf@srl05.cacs.usl.edu (Phil G. Fraering) writes:
>
>>>These couldn't be Frank's minicomets, could they?  His putative
>>>objects are supposedly in prograde, earth-like orbits, to reduce the
>>>impact velocity enough to avoid observational constraints.
>
>>I'd bet Frank will claim that these bodies represent the "larger"
>>members of his mini-comet population, but I don't know.
>
>I can affirm that Lou Frank considers these results to be confirmation of 
>the "small-comet" hypothesis, and his calculations show that the fluxes are 
>approximately correct.  
>
>  {Some stuff deleted...}

On the contrary, in his earlier work, Frank made some estimates for 
how many small comets are necessary to account for his detection rate.  
The rate of impact on the Earth of his cometesimals is about 10 million 
per year.  The rate of impact of our 10 meter objects is on the order of 
about 10 per year.  I believe his estimates of size placed his objects 
in the 10-30 meter class.  He would therefore expect about a million 
times as many objects as we are seeing or we should detect on the order 
of 30000 of his cometesimals EACH NIGHT!  I think we quite effectively 
disprove his hypothesis on the existance of cometesimals as he has 
proposed them.  (Note:  My estimate of 30000 per night differs from
my estimate in an earlier post since I made the earlier estimate from
my memory of his work.  I looked up his estimate before revising it and
I was apparently over conservative in my memory, having said earlier 
that we should detect about 1000 per night.)

I'd like to see his latest estimates for the number and size of his
small comets required to account for his detection rates.  He must
have downsized them considerably to account for the 6 order of magnitudes
required to reconcile the difference between his estimates and the
Spacewatch discovery rates.

>------
>From the First Space Science Department in the World:
>                                                    :      _^ ^_    ____
>     Patricia H. Reiff                              :     / O O \   |GO \
>     Department of Space Physics and Astronomy      :     \  V  /   |OWLS\
>     Rice University, Houston, TX 77251-1892        :    / ""R"" \__/
>     internet:  reiff@spacvax.rice.edu  (128.42.10.3)    \ ""U"" /
>     SPAN:      RICE::REIFF                         :    _/|\ /|\_
>
>"Why does man want to go to the Moon? ...  Why does Rice play Texas?"
>   ....JFK, Rice Stadium, 1962

Jim.
---------------------------------------------
Jim Scotti 
{jscotti@lpl.arizona.edu}
Lunar & Planetary Laboratory
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721 USA
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