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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
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.
The Autobots have arrived!
NASA tracks space debris the size of a golf ball, why didn't they see this?
Because it was not in a low-earth orbit, and space is kind of big.
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.
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.
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.
http://ktvn.images.worldnow.com/images/17652544_BG1.jpg
Why? It's not like we can do anything. Personally, I would not like to know that a meteor is about to slam into the earth and end life as we know it.
We can tell people to move..
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."
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.
Imagine if it had been a 1982 3/4 ton GMC conversion van with a desert mural on the side! If the van's a big rock, don't try to knock!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.