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Meteorite Causes Illness in Peru
eldavojohn writes "A meteorite struck in Peru on Saturday leaving cinders, rock & water boiling out of the ground. Villagers nearby reported headaches & vomiting and attributed it to the event. From the article, 'Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said. Rescue teams and experts were dispatched to the scene, where the meteorite left a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) and 20-foot-deep (six-meter-deep) crater, said local official Marco Limache.' It's not yet clear whether this is from the meteorite, gas trapped underground that was released or a chemical reaction between the two."
Ah, I suspect this was either not a meteorite or there is something else going on given that any meteor leaving a 30 meter wide and 20 foot deep crater (meteor being approximately 30 inches wide) is not going to hit the ground steaming hot. On the contrary, it will be cold as ice (or colder) given its composition and time for heating. However, I suppose it could also be a re-entry event from a satellite carrying a toxic payload like plutonium... After all, we have the remnants of many satellites and the debris associated with them still in decaying orbits and you can easily spot many of them. Some satellites particularly those from the former Soviet Union and China have a history of toxic components. Though I suspect we'll know soon enough if it were a satellite, it would have been tracked by numerous agencies and individuals who monitor that sort of thing.
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Looking at the pictures, the ground looks like a prime area for fungus to release spores when disturbed, like anthrax.
yet, this for now seems like radiation poisoning, with headache, vomitting and such.
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Show me a picture of the blasted heath, I want to see! Or maybe this will be the boring kind of meteorite, the one that just raises zombies.
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
There's no other rational explanation. Especially if the meteorite was green. Though there's different kinds of kryptonite out there. For instance Superman is very allergic to red, although it doesn't kill him. ... This is not off topic! :-(
If the meteorite was of Iron/Nickel composition there's a good chance superheated Nickel became vapourous. Nickel as a gas is highly toxic.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It could be a downed satellite - maybe some hydrazine or something is causing the illness.
Nausea, headache, flu-like symptoms. Read all about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_fume_fever
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
My vote is hydrazine. If you can smell that stuff, it'll make you sick. Sick from toxic effects of the chemical, not just sick to your stomach.
http://www.epa.gov/ttnatw01/hlthef/hydrazin.html describes the effects, which seem similar to what these South Americans are experiencing.
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Could this be just another failed launch such as the russian proton which failed about a week ago and was fueled with rather toxic hydrazine? Any satellites launched shortly before this peruvian incident?
Maybe this recoverable craft got recovered sooner than planned.
Sort of.
1) Los Alamos National Laboratory, the place that was making the fuel units for New Horizons, halted production due to a security breach. By the time production stopped, there were enough fuel units on hand to generate partial power. The New Horizons team decided they could live with the reduced power budget.
2) There were 18 fuel units in work when the lab shut down. Assuming they "went away", rather than being reprocessed, they'd likey have gone into the NRO spacecraft rather than the NSA. Solar arrays have two major drawbacks on military satellites: (1) they cause lots of drag, especially when you fly low; (2) extensible arrays can be floppy, making rapid slewing and precise pointing more difficult. You don't get much power from an RTG, though, thus ruling out the likelihood that the plutonium went into radar sats. What about big telescopic IMINT satellites? Again, not likely unless it was something radically different than typical Hubble Space Telescope / Improved Crystal layout. What's that leave? SIGINT and SDI stuff. Tinfoil hat types, feel free to speculate further...
No. Chernobyl had issues, but the reason it melted down was that ALL of the safety features were disabled to run a test for the Soviet equivalent of the NRC.
The test in question was meant to determine how much power could be extracted from a nuclear plant in meltdown. Which information would allow them to plan better for dealing with meltdowns, should one happen.
Alas, to put Chernobyl into the near-meltdown condition required for the test, they had to disable all of the safety interlocks, then push the plant to the brink of a meltdown.
And when you push a nuclear plant to the brink of meltdown with ALL of the saftey interlocks disabled, bad things can happen.
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There isn't a man-made object in space that could create a crater like that. The big ones like the ISS are too low density. The high density ones like the Russian Cosmos nuclear satellites aren't big enough. All of them would have a shallow entry angle that would result in a low velocity for anything that did hit the ground.
As you speculated, when events like this are reported, the various space agencies are usually very quickly able to identify possible satellites that may have entered during a given time frame. For example, a Russian booster entered over my home county about 10 years back. It had already been identified the next morning. Incidentally, it burned up completely. No crater.
Regarding a plutonium carrying satellite. Although I've mentioned such couldn't account for such a crater, there have been quite a few put into space. Cosmos 954, which failed to reach orbit and disintegrated over Canada (note that it was not designed to survive re-entry) is a notable example, but the Russians built dozens of these satellites. Actually, the Cosmos RORSATS were powered by uranium-fueled nuclear reactors, not plutonium RTG's. Anyway, when the RORSATS reached the end of their life, the fuel bundle was actually ejected by a small rocket into a 1000 km disposal orbit, which will delay their re-entry by several hundred more years. I suppose most of the satellite bodies themselves have already re-entered.
Interestingly, this has been found to be a rather major source of space debris, as some of the liquid sodium coolant was ejected simultaneously with but free from the core. Once free from the heat of the reactor, the liquid sodium hardens into little metal spheres.
mild-sickness inducing "smells" are a common form of mass hallucination. probably nothing going on here other than a meteorite impact, followed by someone who said,m "do you smell that?" and soon everyone one did, by suggestion.
The RSD isn't energetic enough to ignite the SRB propellant? The video I've seen has an edit right at that moment (oddly enough), making it unclear.
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Also called foundry fever or Monday morning shakes. Wikipedia article here.
Basically, heavy-ish metals, in particular zinc and magnesium when they burn make zinc oxide and magnesium oxide and give you temporary flu like symptoms. People working in foundries would get a blast of it first thing Monday morning, get "the flu" Monday night, and then be desensitized to it all week long. Over the weekend they'd lose their sensitivity, and get the flu again next Monday.
In high enough doses though - it can kill. A fairly well-known blacksmith, Paw-Paw Williams, died from complications from metal fume fever.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The scouting party stopped a few hundred yards from the village on the bank of the stream. Yen Lee studied the village through this field glasses while his men sat down and lit cigarettes. The village was built into the side of a mountain. The stream ran through the town, and water had been diverted into the pools on a series of cultivated terraces that led up to the monastery. There was no sign of life in the steep winding street or by the pools. The valley was littered with large boulders which would serve as cover if necessary, but he did not expect resistance on a military level. He lowered his glasses, signaling for the men to follow.
They crossed a stone bridge two at a time, covered by the men behind them. If any defenders were going to open fire, now would be the time and place to do it. Beyond the bridge the street twisted up the mountainside. On both sides there were stone huts, many of them fallen into ruin and obviously deserted. As they moved up the stone street, keeping to the sides and taking cover behind the ruined huts, Yen Lee became increasingly aware of a hideous unknown oder. He motioned the patrol to halt and stood there sniffing.
Unlike his counterparts in western countries, he had been carefully selected for a high level of intuitive adjustment, and trained accordingly to imagine and explore seemingly fantastic potentials in any situation, while at the same time giving equal consideration to prosaic and practical aspects. He had developed an attitude at once probing and impersonal, remote and alert. He did not know when the training had begun, since in Academy 23 it was carried out in a context of reality. He did not see his teachers, whose instructions were conveyed through a series of real situations.
He had been born in Hong Kong and lived there until age twelve, so that English was a second language. The his family had moved to Shanghai. In his early teens he had read the American Beat writers. The volumes had been brought in through Hong Kong and sold under the counter in a bookshop that seemed to enjoy freedom from official interference, although the proprietor was also engaged in currency deals.
At the age of sixteen he was sent to a military academy, where he received intensive training in the use of weapons. After six months he was summoned to the Colonel's office and told that he would be leaving the military school and returning to Shanghai. Since he had applied himself to the training and made and excellent showing, he asked the Colonel if this was because his work had not been satisfactory. The Colonel was looking not at him but around him, as if drawing a figure in the air. He indicated obliquely that while a desire to please one's superiors was laudable, other considerations were in certain cases even more highly emphasized.
The smell hit him like an invisible wall. He stopped and leaned against a house. It was like rotten metal or metal excrement, he decided. The patrol was still in the ruined outskirts of the village. One man was vomiting violently, his face beaded with sweat. He straightened up and started toward the stream. Yen Lee stopped him: "Don't drink the water or splash it on your face. The stream runs through the town."
Yen Lee sat down and looked once again at the town through his field glasses. There were still no villagers in sight. He put his glasses down and conducted an out-of-body exploration of the village - what westerners call "astral travel." He was moving up the street now, his gun at the ready. The gun would shoot blasts of energy, and he could feel it tingle in his hands. He kicked open the door.
One glance told him that interrogation was useless. He would get no information on a verbal level. A man and a woman were in the terminal stages of some disease, their faces eaten to the bone by phosphorescent sores. An older woman was dead. The next hut contained five corpses, all elderly.
In another hut a youth lay on a palette, the lower half of his body covered by a blanket. Bright red nipples
A geothermal steam explosion would explain the smells and the sickness should enough sulphurous gases be released.
That said, seismographs across north america recorded a strange signal at about 0817GMT on the day.
The seismograph signals were unusual:
- They started with a low frequency which increased.
- The signal was observed over a much wider area than normal for this relatively small event.
This could be a seismic event which started very deep (>100km) or the result of a large atmospheric disturbance starting very high.
A couple of fairly close descriptions are here already, but let me take a stab at it.
The Chernobyl test was to see if they could power all the plant from the momentum of the turbine after an emergency shut-down of one reactor before powering up another reactor. To do this, they had to take a reactor off-line. They gradually reduced its power output, but just before taking it off, there was some bureaucratic reason why they had to delay the test for 12 hours or so. This caused a problem, because at the low power the reactor was down to, "nuclear poison" build up which slows the reaction. After a point can leads to a complete stop, ruining all the fuel in the reactor. When it was time to perform the test the reactor power started dropping precariously, and to keep the power up, the ended up removing NEARLY ALL the control rods, FAR in excess of the number they are allowed to remove. At that point the water and the nuclear poison were slowing the reactions in place of the control rods. To perform the test, they also had to stop the water circulation that goes to the turbine. Eventually, the power level stabilized, as the nuclear poison started reacting more without the control rods. Then power started increasing, until in a matter of seconds all the nuclear poison was gone. Then, without the water circulation, steam bubbles formed as well, removing the water from between the fuel rods, making there be practically nothing in place to restrain the reaction. The meltdown happened well before there was a chance to replace the control rods, blowing many of the control rods out the top of the building. There were other factors, but I believe these are the central ones. Summary: Unsafe design + Unsafe operation + No containment building = bad.