Russian Meteor

I laughed at the Russians saying their defense system shot it down. Russia has an awesome sense of humor.

Lucky something like didn't happen over India or Pakistan. Chances are they’d think it was a small nuclear strike and retaliate…

Maybe it was the Autobots coming to earth? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kps_CkEEkUo

'Giant' asteroid? Sorry, but not even checking the story, this thing could only have have been the size of a large house. Big effin' deal. That's small. House-sized, they tend to explode from thermal shock while in the atmosphere, often the upper atmosphere.

GuestSaginZero

Thought I heard it was estimated at 10 ton, Tungusta <sp> was supposedly 20 ton. It might have even been less I'm thinking because except for a wall on a building no major structural damage was sustained in that city. A larger one would have smashed houses and buildings flat instead of just breaking windows.

The giant asteroid I was referring too was this one.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/15/us/asteroid/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

At 150ft, maybe not a 'giant', but good size for sure and don't strike the Earth but every 1200 years.

As for the one that exploded in Russia. It's the largest recorded meteor explosion in my life time, sorry, but I find that interesting. Looks like now 1200 hurt, 100 people hospitalized mostly from the glass windows being blown out from the shock wave and a factory roof collapse.

I've been skeptical of this all day, I keep waiting for the punch line. Just that it happened over Russia on the very day we have a close encounter makes me skeptical, I think, too much coincidence there, and that trail looks like something domestic burning, or a rocket trail, not a meteor trail. It actually looks like the trails left when the shuttle exploded. I guess I'm too old and too much of a netizen to not be cynical.

Nana, meteors generally experience breakups in the upper atmosphere. Some of these asteroids aren't held together very well, being merely accretions of smaller asteroidal material themselves. Look at some examples of their trails on google images. You'll see a long singular trail, then an explosion, followed by multiple tracks which burn out quickly.

Remember, these things generally arrive at interplanetary speeds, meaning about 30 km/sec (18 mi/sec). Imagine pushing a pile of cold accreted rocks into a wall of air (granted, it's rarefied) at 18 miles each second. The only asteroidal material that largely retains its shape upon that sort of assault, is the nickel-iron type. Asteroids are generally metallic (nickel-iron), stony or carbonaceous, generally in order of structural integrity. But remember that even the stony ones can just be a pile of stones held together by what's really frost or simple vacuum cementing (where stuff sticks to other stuff since there's no air between them). So the asteroid slams through 18 miles of air each second, basically being ripped apart by forces not commonly found on Earth except in volcanic eruptions.

Thanks, GZ, I have been doing more reading since I posted, just to prove to myself that it was real, and to not be a dumbass, and I guess it was. I just kept thinking it had to be some kind of hoax or a military exercise gone wrong. or something. lol. I need to do more cross-stitch and get off the net more. :)

http://www.meteoritemen.com/

One of my favorite shows. I have what I suspect is a nickle iron meteorite, found in my backyard, about the size of a quarter. I've never had it classified, so obviously I could be wrong. But from looking at many books and doing a lot of net reading it fits. I have also found a flint hide scraper and about 12 fossilized giant clams and what looks like a piece of pottery. Weird yard. To say the least. One of these days I'll get off my butt and go out to UT to the anthropology department and the geology dep. or whatever and have them look at this stuff.

No worries, nana. We're here to discuss and find out what we don't know. Skepticism should be normal, but it has to give way to evidence. I was just saying there was no indication of anything abnormal about the matter.

Holland, if you truly have a nickel-iron meteorite, it's worth some money. The real money is in the ones larger then a grapefruit. I recall one being dug up that was about the size of a football, and it was sold by its finder for $14000, back in the 1980s. I think there are meteorite finders as a profession, and they like to go onto icecaps since those are good collection points for meteorites.

There must be a big effort going on in Russia right now, to find the fragments that landed. In Russian terms, finding a fragment the size of a desk chair would pretty much set up the finder for the rest of her life. Considering the rarity of such pieces, I can't imagine you could glut the market.

Geez, Holland, if I would have just read your link, I could see you already know about meteorite finders. My forehead, meet smack. LOL!

I just checked the news today, and it's what I expected for updated info:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9874662/Russian-meteor-exploded-with-force-of-30-Hiroshima-bombs.html

The 55 foot wide rock, said by Nasa to have a mass of 10,000 tonnes[.]

Nasa estimated that the energy released as the meteor's disintegrated in the atmosphere was 500 kilotons[.]

It entered the atmosphere at 44,000 miles per hour, taking 32.5 seconds to break up at an altitude of around 15 miles above the earth's surface.

Divers were this morning searching the Chelyabinsk region's frozen Lake Chebarkul for a fragment of the meteorite.

I said it should have been about the size of a large house, and I was right on the money. It came in at 12 miles per second (close to my 18 mi/sec prediction) and exploded in the middle of the stratosphere, where pressure was about 1% of what we see at ground level. Although 30 times more forceful than the Hiroshima nuclear strike, it had to propagate down into much thicker air, which greatly moderated the effect. Hence, a lot of broken windows and not much else.

They said on the radio that the explosion was 30 times the size of Hiroshima, but because it was about 16 miles up compared to 3,000 feet up it did less damage to the ground. This has been an excellent view of something science has been afraid of for the last 20-30 years. I think they are going to be studying this for a long time.

Maybe I should have read all of GZ's post.

lol, TIL that Russia has the highest number of auto dash cams in the world, for protection against insurance fraud and corrupt police. I didn't even know they HAD insurance in Russia, lol. If you want a sense of what it’s like to drive in Russia, automotive website Jalopnik compiled what they call the “craziest Russian dash cam videos of 2012.” I'm not watching this, I've seen a few of them in the past, its like watching a plane crash over and over and over...