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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.
Does anyone know if there are any charities accepting aid money yet? It would be nice to help.
At least after this mess is cleaned up, they will have something to tell the tourists. They can take solace in the fact that they aren't the new meteor crater.
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We're being hit by tennis ball sized meteors/meteorites(not sure which one is valid syntax in this case :/) all the time. They don't really do much unless they hit someone.
This meteorite in particular was probably 30cm wide or so, that's quite a lot, actually.
You thought wrong.
Nearly everything in low Earth orbit is tracked, because of the threat to satellites and manned spacecraft. But no organization has the resources set aside to track everything in the solar system.
If you want to try finding every rock the size of a beach ball in the entire volume of the solar system, be my guest.
You really haven't been paying attention, have you?
The standard cliche is that the number of people looking for these things is smaller than the number of people working at your average McDonald's. You want these rocks found, you convince your government to spend the money to do it.
Firstly, it was an asteroid, not a "meter".
Secondly, we got swamped with that news because the media is stupid.
But then again, I could be wrong.
Here I am thinking NASA & co was tracking everyhing bigger than a tennis ball in outer space. How come this thing just goes in without anyone noticing it?
... and by ... 'The Department of Homeland Security: Your safety is important to us. Now, stop asking hard questions.'"
Space is big. It's impossible to track everything bigger then a tennis ball. NASA does try to track some objects that are in orbit, but they NASA never claimed to be tracking "everything".
We've been swamped with news of some other meter which had like a 1^-1000000 chance to hit and this thing just charges in?
Don't confuse NASA with the Media coverage of NASA. NASA has reported other important finds which were not covered by the media. This one story was blown out of proportion.
The media thinks you're obsessed with the OJ Simpson trial, Ben & Jen, Laci Peterson, Princess Di, etc.
"This post was brought to you by 'McDonalds: Our Food tastes horrible and makes you fat, but it's cool!'
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
As of 6:30 PM Eastern Time (Sun Sept 28th), there is no mention of the meteorite strike in any major newspaper/news-website in India.
:)
The cnn article quotes its source as PTI (Press Trust of India) but their website itself (www.ptinews.com) doesn't mention any such thing...
Maybe the Indian media is in deep slumber
Hundreds!?!!? Oh my God!!! It's a good thing we don't have fires anymore, that earthquakes are completely predictable so no one ever dies in those. It's also good we can stop hurricanes off our shores, and 15,000 people don't die in heat waves anymore. So, yeah, now is the time to really get to work on solving a problem that hasn't killed a single person in recorded history.
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SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.