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Huge Meteor Blazes Across Sky Over Russia; Hundreds Injured
New submitter dovf writes "The Bad Astronomer analyzes incoming reports about the apparent meteoric fireball over Russia: 'Apparently, at about 09:30 local time, a very big meteor burned up over Chelyabinsk, a city in Russia just east of the Ural mountains, and about 1500 kilometers east of Moscow. The fireball was incredibly bright, rivaling the Sun! There was a pretty big sonic boom from the fireball, which set off car alarms and shattered windows. I'm seeing some reports of many people injured (by shattered glass blown out by the shock wave). I'm also seeing reports that some pieces have fallen to the ground, but again as I write this those are unconfirmed." This is the best summary I've found so far, and links to lots of videos and images. He also clarifies something I've been wondering about: 'This is almost certainly unrelated to the asteroid 2012 DA14 that will pass on Friday.'"
... hows your space program going.
I'm not sure how it follows from discovering a solitary asteroid with a twenty hour lead time that we can "trivially" perform a sky sweep with enough comprehensiveness and detail to give a "several days" lead time. Yes, we could do it, but it's not at all obvious that it would be easy.
Turning a single impactor with a known trajectory into an unknown number of impactors of unknown size and unknown trajectory does not strike me as a great response to detecting such an object either.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Well how's a interceptor missile supposed to know the difference and why should it even care? A fast moving, unidentified object enters your airspace, why shouldn't you try to shoot it down, even automatically?
A large scale response needs to be done through humans and should require several safety features. But a single automated air defense missile? Does it move faster than an airplane? Has it been announced? Then shoot it down.
No air defense missile is that fast. 10,000 MPH is mach 13, faster than any aircraft not including spacecraft such as rockets and the space shuttle (they need escape velocities of over 25,000 MPH/40,000 kph). The fastest SAM's (Surface to Air Missiles) are the Russian S-300 with a speed of nearly mach 6 while the US built MIM-104 Patriot has a speed of around mach 5. They are plenty fast to shoot down most any aircraft made today.
Another thing to think about is this: The speed of the meteor was so fast that by the time any radar would have picked it up, it would have already hit the earth before a radar operator could even summon his commander to have a look. There is no way they could have scrambled SAM's for launch, the entry and impact happened in seconds.