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U.S. East Coast Bombarded By ... What?
gmr2048 writes: "Our local Fox affiliate is reporting a compact-car size metior may have hit north central PA Monday evening. CNN story here. Too bad I missed it :("
The loyal fjordboy writes: "At about 6:30 EST this evening, many meteors broke apart and headed south coming from Canada. I was able to witness the meteor flying overhead in Trout Run, PA and it was spectacular. There was an incredible bright flash and then a meteor with an incredible tail. A few minutes after it had left, a sound shook the ground and buildings in the vicinity. It even set off some car alarms in the parking lot." Anyone else out there see this in person?
I saw it also. I was driving on 490 in Rochester, NY, when I saw a yellow-orange streak to the south about 10-15 degrees above the horizon. I dismissed the sighting as a very strange reflection or my imagination because I saw it out of the corner of my eye and couldn't be sure what I saw. But now I know what it was... cool.
Sonic booms were heard up to 100 miles from the meteor's path ... would have been traveling between 100 mph and 200 mph.
Wow. Anything that can travel less than 200 mph and still make sonic booms is worth a headline.
Where do they get these reporters? Slashdot?
Basically, No.
Try not to think of it as a Shield. What Bush is proposing is not even remotely comprehensive defense from large numbers of missles. It is meant as a point defense against less than 5 launches.
Futher, the missle defense systems are most likely to target the boost phase of the missle launch. We're supposed to be sitting near by the bad-missile-launching-country at see in military vessles carrying boost-phase anti-missle wepons.
The kind of defenses envisioned in Bush's VERY LIMITED anti-missle system would have no applicability to anti-meteor defense. Basically, unless we get a few years advanced warning about metor impact, we're screwed big time.
-- I am not a fanatic, I am a true believer.
CNN
Witnesses said the object appeared to be traveling from southeast to northwest, "which means it was heading inland," Baalke said. fjordboy
At about 6:30 EST this evening, many meteors broke apart and headed south coming from Canada. Someone's confused.
cb
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
strangely apropos...
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Ze next von, comradeskees, vill be pointed at ze capitaliste pigz at Adobe.
That's John BigbooTAY
From the article:
"We originally got a report of a plane crash and now it seems there were multiple meteors coming down," said Tara Dolzani, a supervisor at the Schuylkill County communications center in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.
Have you EVER heard a more transparent cover up? Clearly, this is only the first stage of the invasion, so we better start preparing now! Call your neighbors, let everyone know! Head for the hills!
Regardless of the fact that the difficulty of destroying a sufficiently large meteor would be on par with killing all the cockroaches in Chicago with a spatula, missile defense in any incarnation is as practical as trying to stop traffic on the internet by targetting routers. Sure, you could hit a lot of them, in both cases, but the way the systems are structured, something will get through. Modern weapons have such high yields that one bomb, a one-percent margin of error, could result in 20 to 30 million deaths, depending on the weapon's objective. Two little things called redundancy and mutually-assured destruction. You don't have to take my word for it. You can go to the guy who [might have] built the thing. "Go back to bed America, your government is in control" -- George Bush pre
strange things are afoot at the Circle K...
Of course, there's the obligatory "you'll never be hit by a meteorite" statement too... Let me tell you, if this meteor were to hit you, you should do two things. Buy a lottery ticket. Win a million billion dollars if you survive. Impacts of objects that size will leave very large craters and very dark, dark skies. Humans tend not to survive, but strange things have happened..."
Actually, this particular strange thing happens more often then one might expect: Here is a NASA page listing *three* 20th century meteor strikes on US homes, one of which actually hit the occupant, a Mrs. Hodges of Alabama, in the hip, producing one heck of a bruise. Maybe astronomical odds aren't really so astronomical after all...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I saw one, I was sitting on a stoop at 307 N 3rd in Philadelphia waiting for someone just looking around at buildings and the sky and to the NW this big fireball zoomed by; looked to be about a mile away - no sound. I hoped it was a meteor, but thought it might be a small plane or a burning fuel dump from a larger plane. It got pretty low so some of them may have hit. Real quick, just like a shooting star where if your looking the wrong place or blink you'd miss it.
First the robotic arm, not this. It seems that /. always reports stories sure to get me in trouble for my country domain.
~~~~~~
under-paid karma whore
returning a previously stolen concrete PC. /. story)
(See previous
Say no to software patents.
The local NBC station WGAL had coverage on the news tonight (linkage) and had a deep interview with people who fell over and the all important interview with people who talked to the person who owned the farm who didn't see anywhere where something landed and scortched his corn. And my favorite is the group of witnesses "watching deer."
Aren't we early for the Delta Aquarids they aren't expected for a few more days...
Wheeeee
It's a good thing they don't leave out any details that might turn out to be important...
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
So that's where I parked the Pinto...! Man, my insurance company is going to kill me...
Your assumption of our assumption is incorrect.
We assume anyone living in between the two regions is a bum hick yokel or a soccer mom.
The incorrectness of your assumption is the key to the existance of our assumption, so I would assume that further assumptions on your part will be of equally questionable accuracy, assuming of course, the assumption is made with the same kind of genuis the first one was. Our assumption stands, yours sits in a heap in the corner of the room frayed and withered from my elitest northeastern attitude.
Having grown up in the Pottsville, PA area, I can attest that the locals are "hick yokels", but where do YOU live? Nothing irritates me more than the assumption of northeasterners and west coast residents that anyone living in between those two regions is a 'bum hick yokel'. Get off your elitist trip.
--
Were I in touch with the toilet that is humanity, I'd have flushed it long ago.
Hey, just be happy it missed you
Are you kidding, how else am I suppose to get super powers. I mean the irradiated spider thing just doesn't work.
Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
Milalwi
"They're also NOT red hot, glowing or smoking - they often feel cool to the touch immediately after impact. (The reasons are left as an exercise for the reader ;)"
That's true!
It is thought that the reason for this is the outer shell of the meteorite is heated very quickly and blown away ("ablated") as soon as molten material forms on the surface. The trip through earths atmosphere is very short and when it finally impacts the ground it retains most of it's original cryogenic temperature it naturally had in the cold vacuum of space.
My guess is the core temperature would not be as cold as the ~3K CMBE of deep space because it would have to be in our solar system in order to impact earth in the first place(obviously)and the albedo of the average meteorite is not perfect (1.0), so each meteorite must reach a fairly cold equilibrium temperature based on the ratio of solar energy absorbance on the sun facing side to thermal emission on it's cold side.
Sometimes when meteorites are found immediately after falling, they are covered in frost!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
President G.W. Bush announced a plan for the new "Meteor Wars" meteoroid defense plan, which would help protect Americans from malicious extra-terrestrial projectiles.
"Although America does not cover a large portion of the Earth's surface, it is largest in its heart, and that is what we must protect" said the President last Monday, ignoring protestors yielding placards bearing the slogan "Outer space is mother nature too, let meteors live"
The current design involves launching a pre-emptive nuclear missile into the upper atmosphere, detonating near the meteor and deflecting its path toward nations such as Canada or France.
Colin Powell remarked about the new plan, "We feel we can obtain up to 95% accuracy in detonating these missiles above ground. The environmental consequences of the nuclear material will be minimal, as most detonations should talk place above Montana or North Dakota."
Don't forget that most of residents of the Northeast US and the West Coast as well are also "bum hick yokels". Deluded, elitist bum hick yokels who think they aren't but I ask you, would anyone who isn't a "bum hick yokel" actually watch Survivor? QED.
So would the m1 ¦Oe shield have protected us?
air and light and time and space
Baalke said the possible size of the meteor "depends on the composition of the meteor and the speed it was traveling. It could have been as small as a baseball " and would have been traveling between 100 mph and 200 mph.
..It would be tough to hit if it was 'as small as a baseball.. Of course it *could* have been as big as a compact car, but then again it *could* have been made of swiss cheese..
air and light and time and space
I am definitely from one of those "smaller towns" in PA. Trout Run is technically a village (by population) CNN is now running another story about the whole deal. Tis located here . About 15 or so staff members at Camp Susque (the place where I work), saw it as well. (it freaked out the girls campers. :) I was lucky enough to witness the flash travelling for about 5 seconds. It left an incredible tail, even in broad daylight (the sun was still above the mountains and incredibly bright at the time...it was QUITE bright out right then) and was absolutely huge. Almost everyone else thought that it was only a hundred feet up in the air because of its size (which is ridiculous because it flew over some nearby mountains).
About 4 minutes or so later. I have heard sonic booms before, when I was hiking and the area got buzzed by some kind of jet, and this was nothing like that. The initial sound was like a massive explosion, and it reverberated down the valley for a good ten seconds or so. It was headed northwest, but appearently a chunk of it hit about 15 miles from Trout Run in Northern Williamsport. The reports say that it scorched a cornfield, but there was no impact or craters. The local radio station claims to have many pictures of some actual impact sites from wellsboro, but I have been all over their site ( wksb.com and I haven't found anything. If anyone has any pictures, please reply.
The anti-salmon
Was it that a giant (1 km I think) asteroid passed between the earth and the moon and astronomers noticed it after it had passed? Scary.
And then there's the CIA thinking a foreign country had detonated some nukes a few years ago, but it ends up they were just meteors/comets which had entered the atmosphere and did what they do best... vaporize and create one hell of a shockwave.
Of course, there's the obligatory "you'll never be hit by a meteorite" statement too... remember, that friction is quite powerful. And incoming objects start heating up way past the "atmosphere" as most (uneducated) people know it. By the time incoming objects hit the dense atmosphere (still well above the surface) they get frickin' hot and vaporize.
So for a meteor to actually hit you, it would have to be so large that it didn't vaporize completely. Let me tell you, if this meteor were to hit you, you should do two things. Buy a lottery ticket. Win a million billion dollars if you survive. Impacts of objects that size will leave very large craters and very dark, dark skies. Humans tend not to survive, but strange things have happened (like that flight attendant to fell 40,000 feet in the tail end of a plane and survived).
Seriously, though, something the size of a car is going to make a nice show of lights and such, but you'd better hope it vaporizes very, very high in the atmosphere.
Light on any impact details, but here it is from the boys who know:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsyste m/ meteor_eastcoast_010723.html
Not sure about the CIA indicate a few years back, but IIRC there was a story in the NY Times about how in March or April of this year, a meteorite exploded over the south Pacific with approximately the force of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Good thing it vaporized over the ocean and not over some major metro area...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
"Which is a shame really because that is exactly what it was designed for"
Learn to Improvise
If something the size of a baseball could make a sonic boom after going only 100 or 200 MPH, I'm sure going to the ballgame would be a lot more fun.
:)
/* ---- */
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7)
I wonder if they meant to says something more along the lines of 1,000 to 2,000 MPH...then there'd be a boom. Ya know, the size of basketballs or volkswagens.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
"At about 6:30 EST this evening, many meteors broke apart and headed south coming from Canada."
Just another example on why we need tighter controls on our Canadian border. Keep the meteors in Canada, where they belong!
I was going to put a sig here, but I had already submitted the message.
My friends and I were having a spectacular battle when I decided to launch a meteor strike as the Lunar Corporation against one of them. The attack never came where I targeted... Spooky.
Why bother.
You are wrong. The only civilised place in the US is Minneapolis. It is well known to everyone here that people on the east coast are snobs, people on the west coast are wierdos, and everyone in between us and them is a bum hick yokel or a soccer mom.
Except for Wisconsin, of course. Those cheeseheads aspire to become bum hick yokels.
--
Yes, the nick is flamebait
And the deep, warm voice of Orson Wells:
"And now, we bring you live to Grover Mills, just outside of Trenton, New Jersey . . . "
radiobox
Too bad I missed it :(
Hey, just be happy it missed you
what the hell is a 'junk character', anyway?
This sounds insanely wrong to me. I dont think any unpowered object travelling 100 - 200 mph could possibly fly across Canada and land in Pennsylvania.
Have you ever heard of meteroids travelling at such rediculously low speeds? No chance of sonic booms.
The huge crater in Arizona, for example, was thought to be made by a 85 foot diameter chunk of iron travelling 45,000 miles per hour.