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Meteorite Hunters Find the West Texas Fireball

Posted by kdawson on from the sweet-dreams-and-flying-machines-in-pieces-on-the-ground dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A fireball streaked over Austin, Texas on February 15 producing sonic booms and startling people for hundreds of miles. The video of the event was shown on national television and viewed by thousands of people on the Net. The first news reports speculated that the fireball might have been debris from a February 13th collision between two satellites over Siberia but space experts said that the object was probably a meteor. Now this has been confirmed: experienced meteorite hunters located a strewnfield about 120 miles north of the filming site of the Austin cameraman and have recovered over 100 freshly fallen meteorites."

6 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Pure speculation... by TapeCutter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...but I wonder if it had anything to do with this. Perhaps the asteroid has passed this way before and was broken into smaller chunks by gravity. Would be interesting to see if someone could figure out the fireballs tragectory.

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    1. Re:Pure speculation... by beav007 · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Posting to undo my accidental offtopic mod. Sorry.

      People continue to deny that this is an issue, but it happens often enough that it clearly is. I have noticed that it especially becomes a problem when using trackpads.

      CmdrTaco: Please can you fix this now? Please?

    2. Re:Pure speculation... by chromas · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I am using a trackpad, but it was the arrow key this time, due to scrolling while the combobox was selected. There's a drawback to replacing the "Moderate!" button with javascript without having an Undo feature.

    3. Re:Pure speculation... by TapeCutter · · Score: 1, Interesting

      "CmdrTaco: Please can you fix this now? Please?"

      Looks like your subscription has expied, as had mine until just now...

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
  2. Re:Qualification by TapeCutter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Consider a 5 meter ball of steel hurtling toward the N pole. At the same altitude over the S pole is a single Iron atom hurtling toward Earth at the same speed. They will both hit the atmosphere at the same time without influencing each other.

    The 5 meter ball will make a direct hit on Santa wiping out any Elves within a considerable radius.

    The Iron atom on the other hand will start hiting single atoms/molecules. Suppose you could somehow freeze every atom in it's place before the Iron atom hit the atmosphere until it, hit the ground. (go away chemists).

    If you have ever played pool you will understand how increadibly acurate that first contact the Iron atom makes would need to be to hit a five meter target on the ground.

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
  3. midwest farms a productive source of meteorites by peter303 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've heard of number of "hunters" who strap a magnetometer on their ATVs and criss-cross fallow fields looking for iron-stones within the top couple feet. This is the easiest terrain to routinely run ATVs over. Teh slashdot-types whould automate this with GPS and artificial intelligence.