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.

Comments

Re:Sending Aid

[ghostlibrary]

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.

Orissa gets it again

[jpetts]

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?

Re:What's all this then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, NASA does not track everything larger than a tennis ball. The U.S. space command (part of the air force) tracks most things larger than a tennis ball in low Earth orbit . If this came from interplanetary space there is almost no chance to see it. There are search programs going on, but right now they cover only the northern hemisphere, and with a size down to about 100 meters in diameter. The Australian government recently slashed funding for the only southern-hemisphere search.

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.

Re:Something seems wrong with this report

[grozzie2]

If you have a baseball-sized meteorite of density 3.2 g/cc, using a value of 1.2 kg/m^3 for the density of air, you will find that the meteorite will slow from its approach velocity of roughly 11000 meters per second to its terminal velocity of 60 m/s in a mere 28 seconds, having traveled only 3 km.

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.