Slashdot Mirror
Meteorite Strikes Indian Village
PS writes "The BBC is reporting that a village in eastern India was struck by a meteorite Saturday evening, wrecking several houses and injuring about twenty people. Fortunately, no one appears to have been killed by the impact or subsequent fires. CNN suggests that a second village near the impact site may have also been struck by part of the meteorite." Human/meteorite encounters are not entirely unheard of.
Its eastern India. Please Read article first. The article also goes on to say that the only living creature to be harmed by a meteor in recorded history was an Egyptian Dog which had the misfortune to be at the wrong place at the wrong time :-) . This happened in 1911 BTW.
--> Your Wisecrack Here
BBC: "At least 20 people are reported to have been injured after a meteorite crashed to Earth in eastern India."
Brief summary after the headline.
It's eastern India. not western India. Does any one verify any stories over here?
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I read in the local paper (link about half way down - reg required) that the same thing also happened in New Orleans this week. The meteorite, which looked like a snady colored rock containing minerals commonly found in meteorites (tested at Tulane University) punched a hole through Ray Fausset's roof and two floors before coming to rest in the crawl space beneath the house, as reported.
Actually, if they just gather the pieces of the meteorite and sell it, they'll have all the aid they need. An observed fall will sell for at least a dollar a gram, likely more.
Market it as "noticed fall, [date fell] [location]", it's a couple of bucks a gram to people who like to collect meteorites.
Market it as "chips of the man-slaying meteorite", and you could probably multiply that price by ten and sell it via Home Shopping Network. Ugh.
A.
This comes just a couple of years after the flood in Orissa. Wonder what the Orissans have done to piss off Jesus/Allah/Krishna so much?
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
There is NO way currently to track all the stuff that size in the solar system.
So in fact, it is quite possible that a dinosaur-killer could hit New York tomorrow and wipe us all out, and we would have NO warning. Thank your government for their lack of foresight for that.
With the ongoing cold war between India and Pakistan, the Indian military might well have shot first, and asked questions later, causing a small nuclear war, and a much greater loss of life than the initial meteorite.
The first problem with your math, you are assuming the meteor hits air at 1.2 kg/m^3. that's the density of air at sea level, not the density at the upper levels of the atmosphere. The real factor that matters is the angle of penetration. If the meteor is travelling at 11,000 m/s as you say, and hits the atmosphere vertically, it will encounter thin air initially. At an altitude of 6000 m, the density is already half that of sea level.
It's far to late in the evening to drag out serious mathematics, but, suffice it to say, if the meteor size of a baseball has a vertical penetration of the atmosphere at 11,000 m/s, it's likely gonna be still travelling well above the atmospheric terminal velocity at impact. The atmospheric drag will not have caused it to shed all that velocity in the minute or so it'll take to reach impact, assuming of course it's got enough mass and density to not have melted completely due to heat from friction.
If the angle of penetration is shallow, then yes, it'll spend a significant time in the upper atmosphere, and it'll likely be travelling at/near the terminal velocity induced by the sum of atmospheric drag, and 9.8 m/s^2 vertical acceleration applied by the mass of the earth. Essentially nothing more than a rock falling out of the sky.