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Meteor Spotted Yesterday Over Midwestern United States
the1337g33k writes "The National Weather Service is reporting that a fireball that many people witnessed last night is a meteor that entered the atmosphere last night around 10:10 pm Central Time. This meteor was spotted by many in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois."
It wasn't an Autobot.
this was just GameStation coming to claim their recently acquired souls..
Just a hint to any slashdotters in that area, a few of my friends a couple years back watched a small meteor impact up near Sonora Pass in California. It was close by so they took a weekend and went camping up on the pass. They wandered about relatively aimlessly looking for any rocks that seemed odd or out of place. When they found a suspect, they used some magnets they had brought to see if it was ferrous. Eventually, they found one small chunk of rock (think size of your hand) that the magnet stuck to out of sheer luck. They brought it back, had it evaluated by someone (can't recall who, but someone at a nearby university), and ended up selling it for just over $1000 since it was, legitimately, a small chunk of the meteor. If any dotters have a taste for adventure and have a weekend to kill near the area that this impacted, you should go out and see what you can find. It might pay off.
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The CNN article states that the fireball was visible for about 15 minutes. That seems awfully long for a meteor.
Fox11 News in Milwaukee has a dramatic video of the meteor taken looking slightly north of west in downtown Milwaukee, WI.
Any idea where it actually landed? DID it actually land -- or just burn up in the atmosphere?
One day we'll be able to predict events like this. You'll see something in the sky, go to a website, or pull up an app on your smart phone, and it'll have a designation based on when it was first detected and the flight path that object took to hit the atmosphere. Maybe the website will look something like this, but hopefully not ;) Tracking small rocks like this might seem like a waste of time, until we predict one that is going to hit a major populated area - lives could be saved. This would be a side-benefit of the real purpose of the program - detecting planet killer sized hazards and preparing for the day when we need to divert one. The economic benefits of capturing asteroids in orbit and utilizing the materials should also be considerable.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I was on my way home last night very late, around 11pm and saw a meter streak about 1/4 the way across the sky. Normally I see them flash a white streak across the sky and burn up quickly, but this one stayed non-white burning stage for a long time and rather slow across the sky. I lost sight of it near the horizon and wonder if that one hit the ground. My location was south central west Indiana and looking east.
None of the video I've seen comes close to the spectacular sight. There was a huge tail of plasma and it was green, orange white with a hint of blue. It was huge and looked like it was close by.
I would bet that pieces will be found of the meteor. FIrst, the orbit / path will be well known, with so many multiple videos of it from different locations.
Second, astronomer Mark Hammergren, of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, predicts that it may have weighed as much as 1000 pounds.
"One of the misconceptions about bright meteors is that they're due to very tiny objects," said Hammergren. But "if something is bright enough to light up the sky like daytime and cause sonic booms throughout the entire area, it's big. It was major," he said. "If it was daytime, people would have undoubtedly seen smoke trails."
I think that this is very sound reasoning. Happy hunting to rockhounds in Wisconsin !
Now, why do we never get such multiple confirmations of UFOs ?
Please Help. My wife and I live in that area. Last night we were out past our usual time and we found a young boy. He was wandering out in the cold all by himself.
We've talked to the appropriate authorities, but we know we need to get the word out as much as possible. The doctors say he's fine, but he hasn't spoken a word yet.
Please take a look at his picture and call your local authorities if you have any information at all. We are desperate to find out who he is.
If nobody can legitimately claim him, we would be so blessed if we could adopt him. For now, Martha and I have taken to calling him Clark. Thanks.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
...burning the midnight oil doing something else other than that... Yeah, that's it.
What, filing their taxes late? I don't get it...
As a Californian, all the Midwest looks alike to me. Is there a Smallville anywhere near the meteor's GZ?
This doesn't make sense for a "meteor". The atmosphere is less than 200 miles thick, and the chance that a meteorite will skim across that relatively thin layer of atmosphere long enough to be sited along a 700-mile path over multiple states is infinitesimal. Multiply that by the tiny fractional probability that it would have enough mass to burn that long and the odds look impossible.
More likely, this was a massive satellite in near earth orbit. That's really the only reasonable thing which would match the observations.
So, since it's not being reported as a satellite it's probably a secret satellite. We already know that NASA launches classified payloads. It's safe to assume that other countries do too. Stealth technology would be simple, just build it with flat metal sides painted black and power it with a self-contained reactor (and there's your mass).
The orbit of this will be found very quickly - probably within 24 hours. That will rule in or out whether it was in Earth orbit.
Note that
- there are orbits for all satellites bigger than a few kilograms, secret or no. It's hard to hide up there and
- there have been number of multi-state meteors in the past. This, if a meteor, would not be very unusual.
Mod Parent Down
The atmosphere is less than 200 miles thick, and the chance that a meteorite will skim across that relatively thin layer of atmosphere long enough to be sited along a 700-mile path over multiple states is infinitesimal.
One might say that the odds were...astronomical.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I was on my way back to Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight when I saw this outside my window seat. We were traveling east and it was several miles to our north, but impressive nonetheless. From my perspective, it was looked a lot like pictures you always see of comets. For the few seconds I was able to see it, it was burning white hot and got more intense just before it broke up into 3 pieces and quickly disappeared from site.
I'm not sure what it was, but it made for a fantastic show!
âoeItâ(TM)s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."