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Meteorite Bowling
La Camiseta writes "According to this article from the Guardian Unlimited Observer, some members of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society want to drop bowling balls from airplanes onto the Utah salt flats to simulate meteorites falling. Unfortunately, it's hit a few snags."
They could be dropping Ipod's and other mp3 players instead. I guess that would recieve some attention... "First mp3 player in space bombs".
Of course, it wouldn't really be in space. But who trusts newspaper headlines anyway?
Snags??? I suppose you mean the TOWN under the area they wanted to drop the balls on. Doh!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
On the other hand, I suppose if they get a little bit of english on the ball....
This sig no verb.
I used to think that toilets on airplanes were like the toilets on train - open underneath.
That would make for some interesting meteorites no?
Daniel
Carpe Diem
I would think that these smart people would realize that simulating a meteorite impact would need something other than bowling balls. Doesn't the composition of such fast-moving objects make some difference in how they bounce? Last time I checked, meteors aren't made of bowling balls. Plus I can imagine why everyone in utah would want to be on the government's side on this. Sure, dropping things from planes is cool, but what if it lands on your wife. (Mabye that's why they have spares in utah)
Sounds like a group of crackpots to me - not that there's anything wrong with crackpots mind you. There has to be someone around to go wild about free energy theories and such. Just wait until one of them is right. (Little do we know, many have already been right, but they've been carted off to the island)
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The should contact David Letterman - he has all sorts of experience with this sort of stuff.
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'Released high in the atmosphere, the balls would reach the same velocity as a meteorite. Then we would discover if they bounced off, punched through or exploded,'
I went to college with a guy who tried a similar experiment with a bowling ball and my dorm. Oddly enough, he was the one that was bounced.
'We're not stupid,' added Wiggins.
All I could think of after reading the article was Chief Wiggins and Ralph dropping heavy things out of an airplane.
"Dropping things is fun, huh daddy?"
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
I got it!
This statement is false.
some members of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society want to drop bowling balls from airplanes onto the Utah salt flats to simulate meteorites falling. Unfortunately, it's hit a few snags
Well, that shouldn't be a problem... a 4,000 mile-per-hour bowling ball probably wouldn't have any problem plowing straight through any snags that got in the way.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
This is practical science and they'll get a real understanding of some physics out of it. As the article says, they're planning on dropping several objects, maybe even a real meteorite.
:)
It's a chance to for the practical study of impact physics and craters. Actually, the scientist in me wants to know what happens if they dropped a much larger rock or boulder (several tons) from a high-altitude plane. The energies involved would be much more interesting than the 20-lb objects they've been talking about.
Of course they're going to take precautions and make sure that nobody gets killed by falling rocks - but the public gut reaction is often to treat such quirky experiments as acts of insanity or vandalism.
On a lighter note, I'm actually suprised the military has never (to my knowledge?) investigated the "dropping rocks out of airplanes" destructive technology.
I'm not a phsyics expert, so this may be a stupid question...
Couldn't you just fly a lot lower an shoot things, like maybe start with potatos?
"...some members of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society want to drop bowling balls from airplanes..."
Who doesn't?
An object falling through wind shear accelerates up to the speed of the air mass, like a boat in a current. How quickly it does so depends on the object's mass and drag. A bowling ball is pretty dense (hard to accelerate) and low drag (hard to accelerate), and it won't even be in the air very long. Airplanes are mostly air, thus lots of cross section, so they pretty much instantly become part of the air movement. However, they also (hopefully) have more than enough thrust to pick their own heading.
The big deal with the Norden bombsight was its oversold ability to compensate for airspeed (the inital velocity and vector of the bomb) and wind speed/direction after the bomb was released. The same would be true of the bowling ball. I'd think the meteor would have a higher terminal velocity -- some of them are basically chunks of metal.
Incidentally, the Bernoulli effect is only a percentage of a wing's lift. I figured out recently that the textbooks make this hard to understand by always depicting the airfoil at a zero angle of attack, at which few planes could stay aloft. Military jets and aerobatic planes and paper airplanes don't rely on it as much, and most planes can fly upside-down provided the gas and oil keep flowing....
Calculate the altitude that a bowling ball will reach terminal velocity, add 100 ft. or so, then just launch it that high using a trebuchette (better than a PC), a rocket, or something like that. I would guess that it would only take 100-200 ft to reach terminal velocity anyway, so what do you need the airplane and the extra altitude for
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
I found a terminal velocity calculator here. I don't feel like hunting up exact numbers, but it looks like a bowling ball isn't gonna manage much more than a few hundred miles an hour. Meteors start out going much faster than that.
This "experiment" has no bearing the behavior of meteors. Sounds like these guys should go review basic physics before they propose dangerous experiments.
You're reading /. and don't know how to spell the name of a Simpson's character? I hope you live in the part of Utah that will allow this to happen. :p
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
I guess dropping bowling balls from planes is right up the insane person's alley. Sometimes one just needs an open frame of mind to understand things of this magnitude. I don't see the problem here; I think these people would spare no expense to ensure these bowling balls wouldn't strike anyone.
I'll bet the council that makes the decision will have a 7-10 split as to wether or not this should be allowed to happen. Those turkeys.
Well just mod me -7 pun.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
Small meteors slow down to terminal velocity as they fall. Big ones don't slow down that much. I'm pretty sure that bowling balls qualify as small for this purpose.