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.
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
...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.
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.
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
The name of the east Indian village translates as "Smallville".
-- Alastair
At least I can get behind outsourcing natural disasters. I'm sure other folks won't like it though.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
i have it on good authority that all the different names for space rocks ending up on earth were created as some sort of scientist inner circle challenge to confuse common men.
As we all know, the first attempt was in naming stone spikes that grow in caves, but unfortunatley many people actually learned what the proper terms were.
Names for space rocks is merely version 2.0.