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Kansas Soil Yields Massive Meteorite
ROMRIX writes "The Discovery Channel is reporting that Scientists have unearthed a 154 pound meteorite from a Kansas field using ground penetrating radar. The article also states that this type of radar may someday be used on Mars to locate water in a future mission."
There are plenty of other places in our own world that could probably benefit from the discovery of water...try Africa. It seems like maybe that should be a higher priority?
I'd hate to get in the way of that radar if its moving 154 pound meteorites. My back of the envelope math suggests you could use it to microwave pizza leftovers the size of a small country. Like China.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Is it Smallville, Kansas? Because, uh, if it is, that's no ordinary meteorite...
I wonder, over the many millions of years that the earth has been around, how many other meteorites of this size or larger have struck ground and subsequently been covered with layers of dirt only to be uncovered later by construction workers who don't understand the value of the space rock, much less identify it as one.
One good thing about our travels to Mars is that every single person who will be there, at least for the early phases of the colony, will be scientists, so we won't have to worry about mislabelled meteorites.
Don't let the board of education find out about this.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
See, before humans figured out how to smelt iron out of ore, there were weapons made out of meteorite iron. A certain number of meteorites are nearly pure iron, and better yet, some is even already alloyed with stronger metals. They were rare and more expensive than gold, but it was a weapon which could pierce right through a bronze cuirass, and was often credited with magical properties. Kings and nobles paid a small fortune for them.
Some of the myths around that kind of equipment persisted even after it was known how to just smelt iron ore. E.g., the celtic myths about cold iron against elves. The only iron that can be processed without heating from start to finish is, you guessed, a chunk of stuff that was weapon-grade iron from the start, not ore. That's more often than not a meteorite.
So other than maybe modern times and construction crews with bulldozers, you wouldn't just throw away such a rock if you found one. You'd sell it to a smith for a small fortune, and he'd make a weapon for a king and sell it for a bigger fortune.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
For comparison several tons of meteoric material enters the Earth's atmosphere every day. If you've roof gutters try running a magnet over the accumulated sediment in the bottom of them, much of the metallic material collected thus is likely recently extraterrestrial in origin. This dust is considered an important part of the hydrologic cycle, providing upper-atmosphere nuclii for water to condense around and form raindrops.
Of meteoric material that reaches the Earth's surface structurally intact (roughly 1cc or larger) there are only about 500 or so objects a year, of which around 1% are recovered for study. The rest are finds of older falls.
These finds are easiest in plains where they stand out in the soft soil with little other stony material. Another good source is permanent ice & snow fields. In both wind erosion & frost heaving can leave these sitting out on the surface for the collecting. "Dust bowls", when local vegetation dries in a drought up and winds scour the soil away, and the many retreating glacers due to global warming, both yield rich harvests. There are also places where a larger meteor broke up at low altitude and showered the area with a rich concentration of smaller bits.
Lastly there is an active market in meteorites, for both hobbyist collectors and those who ascribe religious or spiritual aspects to these stones. Unfortunately their collection is typically undocumented, so any possibility of determining their age or circumstance in situ is lost. That they go directly into private hands means that they are generally unavailable for research. Not all meteorites are of great scientific interest, but several rare types do contain important clues to the nature of the early solar system and the current makeup of asteroids & other like objects.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Nuffsaid
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Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.