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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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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