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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.
Oh no, the sky is falling, the sky is falling! :)
I can't believe Slashdot fell for such lies! .... X-files?
Have you missed the ground-shaking documentary called
Had you watched even parts of this research project you would know that this was a UFO crash site , cleverly disguised as a meteor crash.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
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?
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
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.
Dependable, Reliable Furnishings
A meteorite of not much larger mass could have caused far more widespread destruction. I could be off on my facts here, but I remember reading about a similar event taking place in Russia, devastating several many acres of open forest. Should it have impacted a city, the city would have been leveled. Granted we're all familiar with the meteorite impact apocalypse prospect, all I'm saying is it could be worse. I wonder how many other life forms or even civilizations have evolved on other planets that were completely obliterated because of stellar impacts. Something to fear.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
...you're new here, aren't you?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
super powers from the meteorite yet? =D
--------
Free your mind.
..a US senators house? Would NASA's funding for astroid impact studies double?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I thought the US government had hired Bruce Willis to take care of these meteorite thingies? Did he not manage to blow this one up in time? If not, did he survive the impact? Please, I need to know if Bruce is gonna be ok!!?!
.. then there was a tornado, and a flying saucer, and even a giant robot smashing the vast ammounts of constructions of huts, the mayor was reportedly quoted as saying "weaknesspays" as he rebuilds the village into a vast empire.
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.
Let's not forget that Tokyo is a prime destination also for extra-terrestrial visitors, living or otherwise. They're safe, though, since Godzilla always shows up to eliminate anything that happens to be threatening. Although the city usually....er, nevermind.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
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
Okay, before everyone else posts one of those stupid Slashdot in-jokes... Please post them as replies to this post.
In Soviet Russia, all your asteroid are belong to India!
Imagine a beowulf meteor shower of naked and petrified Natalie Portmans Slashdotting India!
"Where's the BitTorrent link?"
and last but not least...
Darl McBride: "We have good evidence that Indian villagers are stealing our intellectual property to the UNIX system encoded in million-year-old rocks... evidence will be presented shortly. In Sanskirt."
The name of the east Indian village translates as "Smallville".
-- Alastair
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.
At least I can get behind outsourcing natural disasters. I'm sure other folks won't like it though.
Ugh. Tracking Everything? Ya right, if we still find texas sized objects that will end up flying within an astronomically small distance from earth in the next Decade, or Century for that matter, than there is no doubt there are things the size of a Volkswagon that are going to come very close to or hit earth and we have no idea yet. We can track all the space garbage and junk debris orbiting earth, but when a small or even large object moving at 64,000 mph (random number) is going to hit us, than it might never even show up on that "tracking" that NASA does of the earth orbit space debris. I mean seriously. You expect them to see something that was probably the size of a Volkswagon bug out there in space when its moving that fast? Theres a chance, but its slim. Although not as improbable as NASA being able to track "everything". Thats just downright crazy to assume at this point.
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.
"Was it running Linux?"
Shut up and just be grateful it wasn't a beowulf cluster.
KFG
I guess IT jobs aren't the only thing heading to India now!
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.
I was at the Field Museum this past week and got a real kick out of the meteor exhibits. They had several large metalic meteors that were out in the open free to touch. Putting my hand on it and thinking about it flying though space, to be rudely blocked by the planet earth. It wasn't it's fault that there was some stupid planet in the way... Anyway, they also had several examples of meteorites hitting houses. In once case it went through the guys garage, through his car and bounced off the cars muffler, ending up sitting on the car seat. Another one took out a guys gutter. The pictures are pretty funny, all the guys looked pretty pissed off, but it was in the 20s or 30s, maybe people didn't smile back then.
Field Museum Meteor collection
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."
First of all, neither NASA, nor anyone else at the moment, has the capability to track "everyhing bigger than a tennis ball in outer space". That would number in the trillions, if not many, many, many orders of magnitude more. Current tracking systems handle all the junk in Earth orbit, and anything HUGE that we've picked up *so far*.
As for why we get news of something with a remote chance of hitting Earth - that's because these objects are typically hundreds, if not thousands of metres across. If one of these hit, it would kill millions of people, and possibly wipe out most macroscopic life as we know it. That's why you hear about them.
What landed in India was a few inches across at best, or you wouldn't see "20 people injured, no deaths". And detecting even a tiny fraction of the things in space at that size is well nigh impossible. Meteors of this size hit the planet all the time, but almost always land in remote areas.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
IIRC, Deep Impact had one chunk of comet hitting the Atlantic, and the second chunk aiming for Canada.
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
I found it:
Oct. 8-14, 1871: Peshtigo, Wisconsin: over 1,500 lives lost and 3.8 million acres burned in nation's worst forest fire. Cause Unknown
Peshtigo is about 130 miles due north of Chicago.
Same day as the great Chicago fire.
Er, hello, has anyone seen our bluetooth-controlled homebrew robot. It was kinda zooming along when it sorta flew out of range (ie more than 5m away from us) when Joe, who was controlling it, dropped the RC when his Segway sorta 'bucked' for no apparent reason and he was thrown to the floor (weird that--anyone else had this happen to them?). We think one of its methanol power cells might be leaking too so stand well back if it comes your way 'cos Joe says it might take off with a 'whoosh' and behave sorta like an ion propulsion drive--who knows where the damn thing may land.
If you see our robot, please email us. Don't try instant messaging us cos our copy of Trillian seems to have stopped working and our Cingular GSM cell phone seems to be dead too (weird that--anyone else had this happen to them?)
Joe reckons all our comms breaking down has something to do with our uni campus being built under a power line so he's off to put his foil hat back on, but I did notice our Ukranian lab assistant wandering around with a hammer just now and I was a little suspicious when he asked me if I had any old hardware I didn't want, and I'm sure 'deztroy' isn't the name of his home town, as he claimed.
Keep your eyes open for us. Thanks.
PS: Why is Darl gonna present his evidence 'sanskirt' - is he a cross-dresser? Does he like to be called Darlene out of business hours?
AT&ROFLMAO
I mean really, really big.
Bigger than an Olympic sized swimming pool. Bigger than a football field. Bigger even than a San Francisco, which is the largest unit that the human mind can comprehend.
Do you think that NASA can track every object in San Francisco? No, of course not. Even the fedral Narcs haven't figured out how to do that yet (although they're working on it).
Right now, just out beyond Pluto, there could be some whacked out ex-groupie of Wavy Gravy plummeting toward earth in her rusty old VW Microbiotic bus and we won't even know until it takes out Kansas.
Just hope she isn't driving uninsured. Old hippies do shit like that. They think it's some sort of political statement or something.
Anyway, the point is, space is big. Shit happens. Don't worry, be happy. You won't even feel a thing.
KFG
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.
With sufficient acceleration one basketball-size meteoride can inflict far more damage than a 9/11-style terrorist attack.
There's actually not much point in trying to track all these objects. A lot of them are in eccentric orbits (like comets) and thus untrackable most of the time. The rest are no threat because they're in regular orbits that don't interesect ours. The ones that were in intersection orbits got swept up a very long time ago -- that's how planets are formed. The danger comes when these orbits change, after being disturbed by interaction with another object. So if we every get serious about looking out for killer asteroids, we won't try to track every one we already know about -- we'll just keep a general watch for new objects or old objects in new orbits.
Also, really small objects are no threat, because they burn up in the atmosphere. Objects big enough to punch through do hit pretty often, but I've never heard of anybody getting hurt by one. Which I guess indicates that we're not as big a planetary feature as we like to think, and also explains why there's such a short memory for these events. As indicated by the attention the Indian impacts are getting.
More common is damage to buildings and machinery. Speaking of which, if you find that your car has had a hole punched in it by something falling from the sky, do not get it repaired until you've determined the cause -- here are collectors who pay good money for cars with meteorite damage. But don't plan your retirement before you've made sure it's not just blue ice.
Not quite fair. It's not the media's fault that most people know jack about astronomy, and can't distinguish a harmless rock from a killer asteroid. Which is pretty important. Armageddon-style planet killers are rarer than intelligent Hollywood movies, but some scientists think that rocks big enough to wipe out a city happen every 100 years. And in fact, it's been almost that long since the Tunguska event. Which, alas, most people know about mainly from watching The X Files.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.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
I am not an expert on this subject, though I played one on TV (really... but that's a long story). I know enough about meteorites to be a little dangerous.
Though the CNN article credits Press Trust of India, a search on PTI's site found nothing (for me at least).
When the articles talked about burning fragments, it didn't ring true. So, I went to Google to do a little quick research.
Except for those really huge impacts, smaller meteorites are relatively slow movers in the lower reaches of the atmosphere and lose their heat rather quickly. Let me steal some work from:
Date: Mon Nov 30 23:28:41 1998
Posted By: Robert Macke, Grad student, Physics, Washington University
Area of science: Astronomy
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. (By comparison, the speed of sound is roughly 315 m/s.) It then spends another 100 mins or so falling before it hits the ground, giving it ample time to cool down below its original temperature it gained during entry into the atmosphere. (At 60 m/s, it's moving like a fastball, but not much more. It'll still cause a lot of damage if your car or house is in the way, but it wouldn't start a fire or create any appreciable crater. It would probably be a bit warm to the touch.
Any learned assistance would be appreciated. I'm not adverse to being shown to be wrong in a subject that I have little more than passing knowledge.
According to a friend who saw one, it looks like a smoke trailing line that hits the ground with a large "whomph" like sound (how do you spell that?), and leaves a surprisingly small crater. A friend of mine saw one hit, a little over a foot in diameter, about 150 pounds. 2 days later it was still warm enough to set paper on fire.
:)
/. bandwidth - I'd have to sell the damn thing to cover the bill. :)
Nobody believed him when he tried to report it, other than making "Joe Dirt" references, so it's now mine.
Neat side notes - The outside surface has visible feathery outside surface from how it was eroding as it traveled. Also the iron softenes up nicely - you can even see how it deformed some from the impact, and there's a smooth curved arc in the front when it rotated briefly just after impact.
Very cool... I'd post a URL to the pics, but I don't want to pay for the
The Sun Will Explode In Less Than Six Years!
The Sun Will Explode In Less Than Six Years! Wednesday September 18, 2002
By GEORGE SANFORD
The Sun is overheating and will soon blow up . . . taking Earth and the rest of the solar system with it, scientists warn.
The alert was issued after an international satellite photographed a massive explosion on the surface of the Sun that sent a plume of fire 30 times longer than the diameter of Earth blasting into space.
"It's a sign that the Sun is ready to blow . . . I don't know if I can put it any more plainly than that," says Dutch astrophysicist Dr. Piers Van der Meer, a top expert affiliated with the European Space Agency.
"It will be like a nuclear bomb trillions of times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima going off at the center of our solar system.
"When that happens Earth will be instantly incinerated along with all life on it. It's like when a marshmallow falls into a fire, blackens and melts."
Scientists say the problem is the Sun is literally getting too hot.
The core temperature of the Sun is normally 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. But in recent years it's climbed to an alarming 49 million degrees, says Dr. Van der Meer, leader of a team of Amsterdam-based space scientists who've been tracking the changes in the Sun.
"It's quite similar to when a star goes supernova at the end of its life," Dr. Van der Meer explains. "Over the past 11 years, we've seen our Sun go through changes frighteningly like those that took place in Kepler's Star right before it was observed going supernova in 1604."
Temperatures on the surface of the Sun have been steadily climbing over the past decade, the scientists say.
"This, we believe, not man-made pollution, is responsible for global warming and the alarming effects that we've seen take place on Earth such as the melt-down of the Antarctic ice shelves," asserted Dr. Van der Meer.
The July 1 images were taken by the space-based Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a satellite designed to study the internal structure of the Sun and operated jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency.
"The explosion . . . known technically as an eruptive prominence . . . was colossal," said Dr. Van der Meer. "This is the final warning sign we've all been dreading."
The Dutch scientists calculate that if temperatures keep climbing at the current rate the Sun will be unable to sustain itself.
"It will blow apart like an out-of-control nuclear reactor within six years," predicts Dr. Van der Meer.
NASA refuses to confirm the Euro-pean scientists' assertions and a White House source said, "We don't need anyone spreading more panic now."
Post has been up long enough, slow topic, we'll see...
First is on desk, thats normal sized pen in front.
This is closeup of surface detail... Sorry for small pic size, these were taken w/ PDA...
again, posting as anon because of the OT nature of this post.
Conservative Christians (CC)? who said about CCs. I have plenty of literate, educated, honest CC friends. and they all can see through Ms. Coulter. She is not a model CC and I hope you do not think of her as one. Have you tried listening to any of her points or read her book? Please! For example, she claims Joseph McCarthy was a god-send. C'mon people. Joe Mac was as big a disaster in violating civil rights as any one. Not one self-respecting CC would give a cent of credibility to Joe Mac. She's a sensationalist. Kind of like Bill O'Reilly. And, we all know they are both big fat liars.
On another topic, Al Franken caught Bill on so many lies in his latest book, and he goes cry-baby everytime he meets Al. Bill and Ann: desstroying the American CC viewpoint faster then Bush/Chenney destroying American economy.
BTW, I do respect many CC politcians and viewpoints. Some of the more considerate and sensible people in the CC field are: McCain, Powell, Jesus, Reagan (for the most part), among many others.
--jpu8086
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
Jesus = conservative? Have you read the new testament? Something along the lines of..
"it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle then for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven".
Jesus was a hippie. BTW, I'm engaged to a devout Anglican, and she thinks that people like Coulter are an embarrasment to Christians worldwide.
The Nakhla meteorite you are referring to killed just one dog. Several people have been injured by meteorites. (I remember at least one local newspaper story of a guy who got a fist-sized meteorite through his windshield at 80 km/h, and was injured when he drove off the road.)
A meteor does not necessarily reach ground, it may burn entirely in the atmosphere. In contrast, a meteorite hits the ground.
In 1908 the Tunguska meteor injured several people, one of them died a few days later. Dozens of reindeer got killed, and they were 30 km away. I assume some wild animals closer to the site were also killed, but the site was searched only in 1920s so we have no record on that. The blast was equivalent to 15 Megatonnes, so only one dead human is really good luck.
Meteorite impacts on Mars throw rocks from the surface upwards at greater than Martian escape velocity. The rocks then sail through space for a few million years before some of them bump into Earth.
It was probably accelerated to escape velocity by an impacting asteroid millions of years ago.