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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."

10 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 Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 4, Informative

      If it had broken up before it entered the atmosphere, it would have been much more widely scattered. Very small aerodynamic effects around the rocks way up in the upper atmosphere would cause their entry trajectories to be very different... the individual rocks would likely have landed hundreds of miles apart, not clustered around a single farmer's field.

      In other words, in such circumstances the Butterfly Effect has vastly more influence on small, irregular objects than it is on, say, a large, smooth, symmetrical, engineered re-entry vehicle.

  2. West, Texas, not West Texas by Dahan · · Score: 5, Informative

    The town is named West, and it's not actually in West Texas--it's more Central Texas.

    1. Re:West, Texas, not West Texas by spiffyman · · Score: 3, Informative

      Thanks for pointing that out. Having family in west Texas, I was wondering why I hadn't heard about this. Incidentally, if you're ever driving through West, the kolaches at the Czech Stop there are worth stopping for.

      --
      So you can laugh all you want to...
  3. Qualification by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 2, Insightful

    of course it does depend on the size of the fragments... if they were large, the effect would be smaller.

    1. Re:Qualification by MrNaz · · Score: 2, Informative

      The Butterfly Effect refers to chaos theory, which states that, at a macroscopic level, large changes can be brought about in a system by factors that are relatively very small. This is often illustrated by relating the flapping of a butterfly's wings on one side of the Earth to the follow on effects leading to a hurricane on the other side of the planet.

      I don't think it was the parent that referred to the effect wrongly, but the initial post where it was used to explain that smaller objects would be affected more than large objects. While this is true, it is not, in my view, really an appropriate use of the principle.

      --
      I hate printers.
    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.
  4. Re:Feed the Trolls by krystar · · Score: 4, Informative

    well technically, you could get hit by a meteor. a meteor doesn't become a meteorite until it lands on the ground. if you got hit by the falling object, that'd be a meteor hit. if it impacted ground and fragmented into debris and hit you, then it'd be a meteorite hit.

  5. The story is a lie. by Alsee · · Score: 2, Funny

    It was a UFO, not a meteor!
    This story about finding "meteorites" is just a government coverup!

    Aliens walk among us.
    The Rapture is near.

    -

    --
    - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
  6. 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.