Rototilling with a Meteor

[897tgigvib]

For over a week scientists said a small asteroid would pass near Earth but would definitely miss. Said it would be the day after Valentines day. Wake up this morning to news a large meteor hits the middle of asia.

Can't tell if the initial reports are real but tons of videos of it...

 

[Chickie'sMomaInNH]

i suppose it depends on which news source you're watching/listening/reading. i saw that it was in Russia that this happened, and there were 2 different reports saying the number of people hurt-from 400 to over 500 at the time i saw it this morning.

doesn't this sound like someone is going to pop up at any time now and say 'February Fools' Day!

 

[897tgigvib]

Time used to be when we could trust the news

 

[digitS']

Here are some quick links on the asteroid:

From the California Academy of Sciences: Science in Action this Week: Asteroid 2012 DA14 will come very close to Earth on February 15, 2013 (click).

Here is Ripley's Believe it or Not! (click) . They have a link to watch the NASA live stream of the event!

Here is a video from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory & NASA, you can clik the pic:



As we are steeling ourselves for the expected near miss of DA14 . . .

. here is the meteor that explodes over Russia story! (click)

I just saw a little of the Weather Channel news and it seems that hundreds were hurt by breaking glass windows. I believe that this part of Russia is west of where DA14 just might be visible. If it was near the path of the asteroid and I was living there, I think I might find an excuse to be doing something in the basement about then.

digitS'

 

[hoodat]

It's fortunate that it exploded in the atmosphere before actually hitting or the damage would have been a lot worse. What was felt was the shock wave from that explosion.

 

[journey11]

It's fortunate that it exploded in the atmosphere before actually hitting or the damage would have been a lot worse. What was felt was the shock wave from that explosion.

I thought this was interesting, from a Yahoo News article...

Friday's flyby is record-breaking; skywatchers have never before recorded an asteroid of this size passing so close to Earth. Unrecorded close calls are another story. In 1908, a hunk of space rock about 150 feet (45 meters) in diameter screamed into the atmosphere near the Tunguska River in Siberia. The asteroid or comet fragment about the size of the White House broke up explosively in the atmosphere, leveling more than 800 square miles (1,287 square kilometers) of forest.

Can you imagine if something like that hit even a rural populated area?

 

[digitS']

It would be terrible!

And, with a higher and higher human population, we are putting more and more people in harm's way!

I live where volcanoes reside . . ! When Mount Mazama blew the top half off the mountain to form Crater Lake, it covered over 500,000 square miles with ash. Some of it was over 20 feet deep! This was about 7,500 years ago, well within the time of native Americans.

When the Ice Age floods occurred out of Lake Missoula and extending all the way into the Multnomah Valley of Oregon and out into the Pacific, an onlooker would have seen the largest floods known to have ever occurred! I wonder if there were Indians here to see them! Where I now live would have been covered by hundreds of feet of water. Multiple channels were cut in the Columbia Basin. The river now flows in only one of them.

Could an asteroid have created the Gulf of Mexico? Every corner of the Earth would have been affected by anything approaching that scale! Since 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by water, what evidence would remain of an asteroid striking the ocean?

Steve

 

[897tgigvib]

There are several things about this:

1) It was immediately suggested to me on seeing this on yahoo news that it was a hoax. It made me realize how dependent on trustworthiness of news we are. It was actually plausible that it was a hoax.

2) Amazing the coincidence of this smaller strike, within a day of when a much larger object was set to miss earth by less than the distance of our geosynchronous satellites.

3) Amazing also that this object that did hit was not also spotted in advance.

4) Stunning how of all places on our planet to strike, how near it struck to where an object of similar magnitude struck 105 years earlier.

5) Telling of how human we are, the way the Russian citizenry and politics reacted was similar to how Americans would have reacted, even to one deputy minister saying out loud that Americans have made a new weapon. If it happened here, there'd be some politician saying the Russians made a new weapon. (On facebook I messaged some Russian friends expressing concern, and one was quick to reply they are alright as are their purebred cats. The other is further south but well west and is not often on). That minister was not listened to or believed luckily, but it shows how important good communication and trust is between nations in good standing in the world is.

6) Also this tells us our observations of the nearby and crossing objects is far from perfect. Astronomers were focused on one area where the known object was, and failed to look in other directions. Do some of us drive that way?

 

[Smart Red]

For over a week scientists said a small asteroid would pass near Earth but would definitely miss. Said it would be the day after Valentines day. Wake up this morning to news a large meteor hits the middle of asia..

So by now everyone knows that there were two meteors, right? One that hit the atmosphere and landed (in pieces) over a goodly part of northern Russia

AND

A small asteroid - the size of a double decker bus - that was predicted. It passed closer to the Earth than the orbit of many of our satellites, but continued on with no problem.

Love, Smart Red

 

[Chickie'sMomaInNH]

i heard there was another meteor that skimmed over the San Fran, CA around 7:45pm last night too. http://news.yahoo.com/russian-meteor-blast-bigger-thought-nasa-says-234920189.html the latest update i've read so far.