Meteorite enters atmosphere over Russia

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Wardez
Nahh, in Soviet Russia, space explore you.
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I borrowed that line today and everybody thinks it's hilarious. Nice one!

Johnnypenso
Given the time delay in the sonic boom, the speed of sound etc. that puts this contrail several miles up. That's one hell of a big contrail if that's the case!!!
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Because of this thing's immense speed it will have started to disturb the very few air molecules in the lower thermosphere so rest assured that the beginning of the visible contrail is about 200 miles high at that latitude. This was the point where the meteor was carrying the most speed but the contrail is very faint because air molecules are so sparse way up there. It's brightness doesn't change for quite a distance until it gets into denser air where it becomes blinding, probably in the mesosphere, then burns up in the stratosphere where airliners fly. That's my estimate of how it worked out.
 
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Wardez
Yes, it's ~50 meters in diameter and has no chance of hitting in your, currently average, lifetime. It's called 2012 DA14.

It has a 0.00000021% risk (1 in 4,700,000), chance of hitting between 2080 and 2111.

These types of asteroids (DA14, not this small one that hit Russia) impact every 1200 years or so.

Even if it were to impact Earth it was calculated it would have a kinetic energy equivalent to 3.5 megatons of TNT. The Tunguska event has been estimated at 8 to 20 megatons. Impacts like those are "city-killers" but when they do hit there's much more chance of it hitting water or wilderness than us having really bad luck and having a big city hit right on.

So it would be pretty devastating, but not like Tunguska, which did this:
AQviVmK.jpg
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Still not as impressive as the Tsar Bomb, but close. :sly: Now the conspiracy people are saying a missle shot down the meteor, kinda hard when its doing 20,000 mph or whatever. :sly: If you haven't seen the Tsar bomb here it is:

 
Keef
probably in the mesosphere, then burns up in the stratosphere where airliners fly.
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I was thinking about that this afternoon while driving to a customer site to rid him of an evil fake antivirus thing.

What chance would an aircraft have on encountering that shock wave???? Just curious, but is anybody missing any airplanes????
 
NASA just upgraded the specs on the one in Russia:

New information provided by a worldwide network of sensors has allowed scientists to refine their estimates for the size of the object that entered that atmosphere and disintegrated in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia, at 7:20:26 p.m. PST, or 10:20:26 p.m. EST on Feb. 14 (3:20:26 UTC on Feb. 15).
The estimated size of the object, prior to entering Earth's atmosphere, has been revised upward from 49 feet (15 meters) to 55 feet (17 meters), and its estimated mass has increased from 7,000 to 10,000 tons. Also, the estimate for energy released during the event has increased by 30 kilotons to nearly 500 kilotons of energy released. These new estimates were generated using new data that had been collected by five additional infrasound stations located around the world – the first recording the event being in Alaska, over 6,500 kilometers away from Chelyabinsk. The infrasound data indicates that the event, from atmospheric entry to the meteor's airborne disintegration took 32.5 seconds. The calculations using the infrasound data were performed by Peter Brown at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average," said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones."
The trajectory of the Russia meteor was significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, which hours later made its flyby of Earth, making it a completely unrelated object. The Russia meteor is the largest reported since 1908, when a meteor hit Tunguska, Siberia.
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When the astrophysics types are done crunching their numbers, I wouldn't be surprised if we learn that a lot of people in Chelyabinsk are very lucky to still be alive. Having looked at the videos on YouTube and noted the long delay between sight and sound, I think there's an optical illusion in the vids that makes the thing look a lot closer to the camera than it actually was. There's a similar effect with the smoke column from a big forest fire -- you see it and think it's only a mile or two away, start driving toward it and find it's 30 miles away in the next county. My suspicion is that if this rock had broken up right over the city the concussion would have knocked down numerous buildings.
 
Those that have appeared recently (Not the Russian One, but ones like the one above) are most likely pieces broken off of the larger one that passed by correct?

500 kT, that's insane! That's about 38 times the power of Little Boy, a nuclear bomb which did extreme destruction to Hiroshima... Thankfully this didn't land in a city!
 
I saw something like that (though smaller) here last week. I'm about 200 miles south of Frisco.. Seems lots of "shooting stars" lately.👍
 
There are supposed to be quite a few meteor showers this year. There's also that comet that will be rolling through (can't remember when) that could be brighter than the moon.
 
MrMelancholy15
Umm, who mentioned the Tsar Bomba? :dunce: It's getting closer...
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I think the Tsar bomb detonation is one of the most beautiful, yet fearful things I have ever seen. It makes me feel that it is incredible how destructive human-made bombs can be, yet it's so beautiful how incredibly intelligent humans are to create something like this in the first place.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Tsar bomb detonate at 50 megatons, which was about half of the power it was designed for?

Imagine if humanity kept evolving nuclear bombs like this, and the kind of bombs this Earth would have seen to this date.
 
Bram Turismo
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Tsar bomb detonate at 50 megatons, which was about half of the power it was designed for?
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Yep.

The recent events have enforced many voices at NASA who say that the agency should monitor the NEA threats with a bit more attention.

The link also contains information on OSIRIS-Rex, asteroid sample return mission set to launch in 2016. Worth a read.
 

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