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Asteroid the 'Size of a Minivan' Exploded Over California
astroengine writes, quoting Discovery: "The source of loud 'booms' accompanied by a bright object traveling through the skies of Nevada and California on Sunday morning has been confirmed: it was a meteor. A big one. It is thought to have been a small asteroid that slammed into the atmosphere at a speed of 15 kilometers per second (33,500 mph), turning into a fireball, delivering an energy of 3.8 kilotons of TNT as it broke up over California's Sierra Nevada mountains. Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, classified it as a 'big event.' 'I am not saying there was a 3.8 kiloton explosion on the ground in California,' Cooke told Spaceweather.com. 'I am saying that the meteor possessed this amount of energy before it broke apart in the atmosphere. (The map) shows the location of the atmospheric breakup, not impact with the ground.' Interestingly, this event was bigger than asteroid 2008 TC3 that exploded over the skies of Sudan in 2008 after being detected before it hit."
Always said the damn things were dangerous
Planetary Resources has their big announce tomorrow. This was just the size they are looking for.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
For all the foreigners saying "WTF is a minivan?", it is a large family vehicle, smaller than a mini-bus, like a VW Transporter (Combi) , about 10 hogsheads or 0.00001 Libraries of Congress.
This stinks of a coporate cover up. They don't want you to know this but it was actually a Toyota Prius with a hybrid nuclear/tachyon engine that accelerated out of control in the year 2052 due to a software glitch and traveled back in time and...well you can pretty much put the rest together.
NASA tracks space debris the size of a golf ball, why didn't they see this? This is yet another example of how asteroid detection need a higher priority.
The Autobots have arrived!
I think that the Minivan has joined Wales as effectively an SI unit. link
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
'I am not saying there was a 3.8 kiloton explosion on the ground in California,' Cooke told Spaceweather.com.
Love that he has to pre-empt the sound bite stupidity of the press. Too bad t won't work and they'll publish the stupid headline anyway.
Anyone who has an interest in things smashing in to the earth (I do, it's some kind of very fascinating thing for me see: Thanatos) I recommend you check out this film, ideally on a screen absoloutely as large as possible.
It is easy to confuse a Winnebago for a mini-van.
God spoke to me
In North Korea, rockets shoot themselves down - well at least that seems to be the case so far. Oh, apart from that lovely satelite that is still broadcasting songs praising the Glorious Leader - that one is obviously still there.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Does the heat generated as it passes through the atmosphere kill off any organisms that might have been traveling along with it as it flew through the galaxy? Having passed through the cosmos for who only knows how long, would a meteorite chunk be radioactive at all?
Who else read that as "NASA's Metroid Environment Office"?
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
A day later the government of North Korea acknowledged that they had lost track of a test nuclear missile fired around the same time as the asteroid strike.
Unless you were in the desert, you didn't get to see it. We had a whole party set to go see the meteor shower; it should've been a great night for it, given the new moon. Too bad there were dense fog advisories all night. I've seen some pretty cool pictures from Arizona though.
It hit in daylight over Reno-Tahoe.
Imagine if it had hit just a bit further west at night with clear weather. That would have resulted in a very bright flash at night and the aforementioned "rumbling and shaking" over the San Francisco Bay Area.
Now imagine that the orbital dynamics were such that this happened in 1982 instead of 2012. Then you get a bright flash and a rumble over a major metro area during the Cold War.
Most meteors you see are the size of grains of sand. This one was millions of times larger. "Millions of times larger than normal" is "a big one".
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Small asteroid, specifically a meteoroid. Big meteor.
Traditionally, small bodies orbiting the Sun were classified as asteroids, comets or meteoroids, with anything smaller than ten metres across being called a meteoroid. The term "asteroid" is ill-defined.
A meteor is the visible path of a meteoroid that has entered the Earth's atmosphere.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
at least it was mini.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
We need to start calling asteroids "terrorists" and there needs to be oil found on one. We can waste a trillion dollars fighting a handful of poorly funded religious zealots and yet we struggle to maintain even minimal funding to track objects that can easily take out a city if not most of the life on the planet. I keep hearing how rare they are yet there have been several of these high altitude bursts fairly recently and Tunguska was a little over a hundred years ago. If Tunguska sized blasts happen once in a hundred years aren't we due for one? Also how do we know? We haven't been keeping track of them for a hundred years and even historical evidence is sketchy. The planet would barely notice a city sized blast if there weren't large numbers of people below it. Also it's math not established fact. We can go 200 years with no major strikes then have a dozen in a single year then no more for a thousand years and the statistics may still call them once in a hundred year events. None of us may live to see one yet they can happen at any time. Kind of like a lottery you don't want to win.
. . . bongs in hand, and loudly rasped, "Like, wow, man . . . "
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
http://ktvn.images.worldnow.com/images/17652544_BG1.jpg
The word is weltschmerz.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/weltschmerz
Thanks to http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-german-words.php
That would probably be "Weltschmerz"
Weltanschauung (as posted by AC) is the way you view the world. More like an ideology, but deeper.
And don't pet my Mog.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
"Minivan from Space - bid starts at 20 000 $
Thats right the minivan you heard in the news. A unique, once in a lifetime opportunity to own a piece of history and space.
Slight signs of usage from entering the earths atmosphere make it even more authentic" This is your chance to buy the Minivan from space[tm]
Typical minivan driver, didn't even see a planet that was, well, the size of a planet before it was too late.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Forget hogsheads, how much is that in Priuses? Or Teslas?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Was this an American minivan, or a European one? (traces of Monty Python here...).
I'm sure an American minivan will be twice the size of a European one - and let's not even think about those super cool minivans you see in Tokyo....
UK minivan: 1.4 to 2 litre engine, room for 6 people, some bags.
US minivan? I'm guessing probably twice the size, air conditioning, armour plating, drinks coolers, on board home entertainment systems, 4 wheel drive.... ;-)
I can't remember the name, but there's a Larry Niven story about a similar incident (in this case the sun apparently going nova.) If you knew you had only 12 hours to live, what would you do?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Polenüberfallensmittelverzekering? Strassenbahnhaltestellelieferungswagen?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Is the order:
segway, moped, motorbike, motor-trike, smart car, mini, small car, car, family car, SUV, minivan, Bentley, van, mini-bus, bus, truck, one-tonner, 18 wheeler ?
Hey!!!
Where does a station wagon fit in there?
I've got a crap-load of discs to transport...I need the bandwidth, you insensitive clod!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
....in where it landed. Meteorites are valuable, especially if linkable to a historic event.
In terms of significance, 100,000 tonnes (110,231 tons) of matter falls into Earth's atmosphere every year. This was 70 tonnes. Not a significant fraction of the total mass per year, but still quite respectable. Besides, you probably wouldn't want the yearly quota in one lump sum.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Are those Arachnids acting up again? Guess we better invade Klendathu once more before they can lob a bigger rock our way.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Was out and about sunday night.
And I was geek enough to have noted the az/elevation at the time.
Azmith was 325 to 350 or so, and Elevation was 50 deg down to about 30 degrees.
It was losing rather large chunks midway through it's burn..very much not like your normal meteorite.
North Korea have exactly the rocket they need. The first stage of the rocket they tested can drop a nuke on Seoul. Thats all they want. If they demonstrate a rocket which can drop a nuke on Beijing they will be shut down as quickly as China can cut the money supply, so they won't do that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
There's one keeps parking just off our road. It is about the size of the minibus used by our Community Transport to move half a dozen disabled people and their wheelchairs.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
In 2064 the NHSVSA (National Highways and space vehicles safety authority) will still be arguing over what to do about vehicles going backwards in time that are also in reverse, and whether this means that brake lights as well as headlights need to emit tachyons.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
A meteor this big probably didn't vaporize: if you live in the area you should be on the lookout for pieces on the ground.
I hesitate to say this, because it's a large area with a lot of ordinary rocks lying around, so there's going to be a huge number of not-actually-a-meteorite finds. This site http://meteorites.wustl.edu/what_to_do.htm gives the basics on figuring out if you've found a meteorite or not.
This meteor appears to be bigger than the one that came down over Chicago in 2003: quite a few large pieces were found then. But it's much easier to find meteorites in urban areas.
It's a good thing the IMF team in Mumbai was able to abort the detonation of that "meteor".
There have got to be pieces on the ground from this, probably in the desert East of the blast. If you live in the area, I would start by looking on your roof, parking lot, any flat area with no natural rocks.
What happened from this story is essentially a tiny version of what happened in 1908 when a fairly large meteor or faint comet fragment entered the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of probably over 32,000 mph and exploded 5-7 kilometers above the ground with the force of the warhead from the Russian R-36M ICBM--around 20 MT. That's why trees were blown down many miles from the center point of the explosion.
So for fun, I did some quick calculations. I'm not a physicist, but recalling the relationship between kinetic energy, mass, and velocity...
K = 3.8 kilotons TNT = 1.59*10^13 J = (1/2)mv^2
m = 2K/v^2 = 1.41*10^5 kg
So the mass was about 141,000 kg. According to a random source, the average minivan is about 17m^3 in size, so that would make the density of the object 8.3*10^3 kg/m^3, roughly equal to that of iron. So if my math is correct, this thing was basically the equivalent of a solid piece of iron the size of a minivan.
I am not accustomed to the phrasing.
Is it like furlongs per fortnight?
No brain, no pain.
just the carbon containing ones add to the global carbon burden, we need to switch to carbon-neutral pure nickel-iron asteroids and it'll all be good
it was a meteor. A big one
Hazarding a further guess at the density of 3 grams per cubic centimeter (solid rock), I calculate a size of about 3-4 meters, or about the size of a minivan.
...since when has a minivan been considered "big" when we're talking about something from space?
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
It's always the same - they can travel thousands of light-years through interstellar space, but then they come crashing into our planet and leave a smoking hole. It's really hard for me to be concerned about an invasion by a civilization that never invented the parachute.
As I recall, the geologists in California can tell you the trajectory of such things. I remember a story (in Aviation Week maybe) more than a decade ago where they tracked a "wave" traveling around mach X (I don't recall the mach number but between 3 and 6) coming in off the coast and heading out to Nevada. Think conical shock wave from an aircraft. The speculated that it was a new secret plane. Oddly, this event also sounds like it was heading toward Nevada but much louder. So anyway, if they want to see where it went, check with the geologists - they've tracked quieter things.
http://michaelbelfiore.com/2012/03/boeing-cst-100-space-minivan.html
Yeah, I know, sorry. But I'd feel irresponsible if I contributed to a gigantic flood of e-mails to respected meteorite experts, so I picked the most dismissive site I could find. That said, there *are* pieces of meteorite out there somewhere.
Personally, I don't see any real difference between Romney and Obama. Heck, Romney might end up actually being a little more liberal.
When I (American) went to visit an Irish friend of mine in the mid 90s, they called minivans "Spacewagons" there.
Just FYI, in case that helps
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I'm betting this was the meteor that Scott Adams happened to see : http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/gods_matchbox/ (warning: Adams' website has become practically unreadable due to the desperate explosion of intrusive advertising. I read the RSS feed, which carries the full articles.)