A Search For The Parent Body Of The Ådalen Iron Meteorite

Linking recovered meteorites to specific parent bodies is essential for placing laboratory measurements in their dynamical and geological context, but it requires a well-constrained pre-atmospheric heliocentric orbit and a robust method for testing candidate associations. This project develops and applies a dynamics-driven pipeline to search for plausible parent bodies of meteorite-producing meteoroids, with a primary focus on the Ådalen iron meteorite fall of 7 November 2020, for which multi-station observations are available. Starting from reconstructed geocentric state vectors, the method combines (i) large-scale candidate pre-selection using the Southworth--Hawkins dissimilarity criterion DSH against more than one million catalogued small-body orbits, with (ii) backward N-body integrations of the meteoroid--candidate pairs in a full Solar System model, using the Python implementation of the N-body package REBOUND with the high-accuracy IAS15 integrator. The orbital similarity is evaluated through the time evolution DSH(t) over 10 kyr. To quantify sensitivity to orbit-reconstruction uncertainty, ensembles of meteoroid clones are generated by perturbing the pre-atmospheric velocity direction and magnitude and repeating the integrations. Validation on the Annama H5 meteorite reproduces published qualitative trends and identifies 2017 UZ44 as the most dynamically coherent candidate within the updated comparison set. For Ådalen, the initial screening yields 80 candidates; 11 maintain DSH(t)<0.2 over the full 10 kyr in the nominal solution, with clone tests indicating that several associations remain viable, with 2020 TU3 providing the most robust long-lived match within the explored uncertainty range. Overall, the results suggest that, for Ådalen, kyr-scale dynamical coherence alone does not isolate a unique parent body, but it enables a physically motivated prioritisation of candidates for future observational and compositional follow-up.