Tunguska Blast Was a Small Asteroid

malachiorion writes "The Tunguska event, an explosion on June 30, 1908, cleared an 800-sq.-mi. swath of Siberian forest. Was it a UFO crash? An alien weapons test? Now, Sandia National Laboratories has released its own explanation for the Tunguska event. Using supercomputers to create a 3D simulation of the explosion, the Department of Energy-funded nuke lab has determined that Tunguska was, indeed, the explosion of a relatively small asteroid. The simulation videos are well worth checking out — they show a fireball slamming into the earth from the asteroid's air burst. The researchers caution that we should be keeping watch for many more small, potentially earth-impacting asteroids than we are currently tracking."

Comments

Re:Hmm..

[FredDC]

This one they didn't notice until after it nearly missed earth.

So to answer your question: Yes, it's very possible!

Re:Unlikely to be an asteroid

[dreamchaser]

You're wrong.

One of many references if you'd bothered to look: http://www.physorg.com/news819.html

Pertinent section:

Expeditions sent to the area in the 1950s and 1960s did find microscopic glass spheres in siftings of the soil. Chemical analysis showed that the spheres contained high proportions of nickel and iridium, which are found in high concentrations in meteorites, and indicated that they were of extraterrestrial origin.

I've seen the 'natural gas' theory before. It's so contrived that it's almost like science-comedy.