Apparent Meteorite Hits Managua, Nicaragua, Leaving Crater But No Injuries

A wire report from AFP says that an explosion heard in Managua last night, and a 40-foot crater evident today, are evidence that the city was the impact site for a small meteorite that struck Saturday night. The photos are not very exciting at a glance, which is a good thing, considering that a dirt crater and no injuries is probably the best outcome if a meteorite strikes the city where you live. From the article: The meteorite appeared to have hurtled into a wooded area near the airport around midnight Saturday, its thunderous impact felt across the capital. The hit was so large that it registered on the instruments Strauss’ organization uses to size up earthquakes. “You can see two waves: first, a small seismic wave when the meteorite hit Earth, and then another stronger one, which is the impact of the sound,” he said. Government officials and experts visited the impact site on Sunday. One of them, William Martínez, said it was not yet clear if the meteorite burned up completely or if it had been blasted into the soil. “You can see mirror-like spots on the sides of the crater from where the meteorite power-scraped the walls,” Martínez said. (The same news, in slightly shorter form, from the AP.)

Comments

Hope they're keeping people away

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time something like this happened in Central or South America (I forget exactly where and am too lazy to google it) there were toxic gasses released from the soil. IIRC, they determined it wasn't the meteorite that had toxins; but that the impact churned up naturally occurring arsenic or something.

Re:Hope they're keeping people away

[I'm New Around Here]

I think it was Peru. Large amount of arsenic in the ground.

Re:Hope they're keeping people away

[GrumpySteen]

I believe you're thinking of the 2007 Carancas meteor impact.

related to 2014RC?

[jjeffries]

Any relation to the asteroid that got well up into our pearthonal space earlier today?

Re:related to 2014RC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, these asteroids that we detect are usually followed by a "tail" of smaller asteroids and those are too small to detect but they are the ones that actualy make it through the atmosphere.

Re:related to 2014RC?

[Nyder]

Any relation to the asteroid that got well up into our pearthonal space earlier today?

ya, the asteroid was hired to make a bunch of noise in the space watching community, so while all eyes were focused on it, some of it's buddies decided to sneak in the back door.

Granted I know they can't see everything, but it's funny how they make a big deal about how asteroids can hit us, and watching one that won't hit us, while smaller ones don't get seen at all.

Had that hit a populated area, I imagine a lot of peeps would be say, um, oops!

Re:related to 2014RC?

[ShanghaiBill]

Had that hit a populated area, I imagine a lot of peeps would be say, um, oops!

It hit a populated area.

Re:related to 2014RC?

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably meant a worst case secenario for a small one like this, like the packed stands of an open air stadium or concert. An event like that would really turn some heads when it comes to asteroid detection.

Or mayb you'd like something larger, like a tuskunga level event in a heavily populated area that wouldn't raise arguments that it was an attack from another country, so say a small to medium sized city in middle america that has no major stategic assets to speak of so that Faux "News" doesn't have anytihng to pust the dumb to war over it?

Maybe you should return to Managua

[Warphammer]

You could go unnoticed in such a place. Or maybe not.

Re:Maybe you should return to Managua

[dccase]

Crap. I was going to say that.

Coincidence? Or conspiracy?

[mveloso]

Like college age kids, meteors seem to always travel in packs. The Chelyabinsk one was said not to be related to 2012Da/367943 Duende, but it sure is a hell of a coincidence that close flying meteors have an "unrelated friend" that impacts the Earth.

Maybe we got the ugly friend?

Re:Coincidence? Or conspiracy?

[jjeffries]

That's what I was thinking too--we got hit by something's little brother *again*? But OTOH, there's a whole metric crapload of stuff that passes us close by, check this out: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

Re:Coincidence? Or conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason why Chelyabinsk and Duende were not related is that according to multiple sources they had different trajectories, all they had in common was that they ended up in the same neck of the woods at the same time. What we should take away from this is that meteorites happen all the time, though still mostly not on camera and not in a densely populated areas. The solar system is still very much under construction.

Re:Coincidence? Or conspiracy?

[rmdingler]

Or.

Since we were watching for a meteor flyby, the explosion and crater are difficult to imagine as merely coincidence.

Re:Coincidence? Or conspiracy?

[mveloso]

Different trajectories implies different origins, but I'm sure there's a way to show that they could have had the same origin and got thrown into different orbits...which occasionally intersect with Earth.

Re: Coincidence? Or conspiracy?

[MickLinux]

I don't think it's a coincidence OR a conspiracy. I think that as a comet or multi-part asteroid approaches close to a planet, it breaks up like Shoemaker-Levy 9.

As it misses, the different fragments get accelerated at different angles around the planet. At that point, they will end up with vastly different orbits, all focused on the same approximate point in space.

But from a solar-centric perspective, they all still have the same energy, and thus all have the same period.

So they hold a reunion of sorts after that, all passing close by each other.

And if the planet also happens to pass by again, the astronomers can be watching one asteroid, and not see the rabbit punch coming from a completely different direction.

Re: Coincidence? Or conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

As it misses, the different fragments get accelerated at different angles around the planet. At that point, they will end up with vastly different orbits, all focused on the same approximate point in space. But from a solar-centric perspective, they all still have the same energy, and thus all have the same period.

You can't have all of those conditions met at the same time. If the angle changes, it will exchange energy and momentum with the Earth and will have different energy in the heliocentric frame. While scattering things in orbit around a single body will have those objects tend to come back to their point of origin each orbit, any non-r-squared forces, whether from atmospheric drag or non-uniformities in Earth's gravity for satellites, or the fact that Sun-Earth-Asteroid is a three body system, will spread things out (in the latter case, considerably) before their return.

Re:Coincidence? Or conspiracy?

[cusco]

In the case of the previous two, since they were traveling at right angles to each other they were pretty certainly not related. I haven't seen any examination of the path of this new meteor yet.

Re:Global warming AND Bush did this.

[Tablizer]

"warmunists"? No, Bush would call them "warmificationizers". Rework your trolling to make it sound more authentic.

Re:The site previously contained....

[TWX]

Then I'm happy that a meteorite struck it!

Good thing it didn't hit US.

[JWSmythe]

It's a good thing it didn't hit the US. If I've learned nothing else from Hollywood, I've learned this... If any object strikes another object moving faster than about 20 feet per second, there will be a huge explosion.

Except for the very very rare incidents which are strictly for comedic value.

Re:Good thing it didn't hit US.

[GNious]

I'm glad it didn't hit the US - newspapers would have been screaming "INVASION" or something equally silly for days....

Re:Good thing it didn't hit US.

[Anonymous Coward]

"War against meteorites"

Re:Good thing it didn't hit US.

[JWSmythe]

The alien terrorists are bombing us. We need body cavity searches at all airports and major highway intersections!

Re:Good thing it didn't hit US.

[geekoid]

I wish it did. Preferable the capital building,. I don't want anyone hurt, but maybe it would be a wake up call for better funding to watch of objects.

Re:Good thing it didn't hit US.

[cusco]

If it happened in the US there would be an immediate assumption that it was a terrorist attack, even if it just plopped down in a cornfield, and the Pentagon would be invading someone before the first investigators arrived on the site.

Back in the '80s the Norwegians launched a sounding rocket. All the forms had been filled out, but apparently got lost on some bureaucrat's desk in the Kremlin. The launch path looked like a SLBM coming from the North Sea with a trajectory in the general direction of Moscow. The Kremlin wanted to retaliate for the assumed attack immediately of course, but Yeltsin made them wait until the full trajectory had been confirmed. The world had a close call that day. If it had been Washington down-range Reagan would have launched immediately.

Wasn't a meteorite

[Anonymous Coward]

Wilfried Strauch, an adviser to the Institute of Territorial Studies, said it was "very strange that no one reported a streak of light. We have to ask if anyone has a photo or something."

Local residents reported hearing a loud boom Saturday night, but said they didn't see anything strange in the sky.

"I was sitting on my porch and I saw nothing, then all of a sudden I heard a large blast. We thought it was a bomb because we felt an expansive wave," Jorge Santamaria told The Associated Press.

Re:Wasn't a meteorite

[meglon]

A light trail, or fireball, comes about from the object heating up and burning off from the friction of hitting the atmosphere. An object moving fast enough will form a bow shock that will punch through the atmosphere and minimize friction. For an object to move that fast, yet make this small of a crater, the object would have to be very small (maybe baseball sized), and most likely have a very steep entry angle (>75 degrees)... but it's very possible.

Back in the 60's/70's when people actually started thinking about collisions, and considering the damage they could do (as well as how to possibly eliminate a threat like Project Icarus from MIT), one book listed one of the worst case scenarios is a large, very fast mover hitting the oceans, as not only would it cause massive tsunami, it's bow shock could push both the atmosphere and the ocean water out of the way, and deliver a direct strike to the crust at a thinner point cause all sorts of problems.

Re:Wasn't a meteorite

[Anonymous Coward]

A light trail, or fireball, comes about from the object heating up and burning off from the friction of hitting the atmosphere. An object moving fast enough will form a bow shock that will punch through the atmosphere and minimize friction

The vast majority of the heating and a large part of the resulting fireball and trail comes from compressional heating of air... that exact bow shock you are talking about is what is responsible for that. Basically all of the air in front that piles up because it doesn't move out of the way fast enough compresses and heats very quickly to the point of being a plasma, and can include significant light emission.

Excuse me, but ...

[gargleblast]

Excuse me, but are you commenting on the Facebook auto-play problem? That was three stories back.

Re:Excuse me, but ...

[Beardo the Bearded]

Excuse me, but are you commenting on the Facebook auto-play problem? That was three stories back.

Give him a break, he's using IE and this is as fast as he can post.

MOD POINT BUCKET

[retroworks]

Have mod points, but no one says anything interesting? Contribute here to the Mod Point Bucket [MPB] When your mod points expire, we'll owe you.

Re:MOD POINT BUCKET

[Paradise Pete]

It doesn't even make any sense. You don't "get" someone's mod points when they mod you up.

Re:The site previously contained....

[MrKaos]

Then I'm happy that a meteorite struck it!

ba-dom-tish!

Meteoroid, Meteor, Meteorite

[Rootbear]

Managua was hit by a meteoroid. If anyone saw the bright light of its fall to earth, they saw a meteor. If any part of it survived, that's meteorite. Thank you.

Re:Meteoroid, Meteor, Meteorite

[I'm New Around Here]

Until they reinstate Pluto as our ninth planet, I'm going to call all those things meteorites. Just to stick it to da man.

Re:Meteoroid, Meteor, Meteorite

[Tablizer]

Or "very sized-challenged planets"

Re:Meteoroid, Meteor, Meteorite

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Obligatory xkcd: Meteor.

Re:Meteoroid, Meteor, Meteorite

[I'm New Around Here]

[Monty Burns Voice]
Excellent.
[/Monty Burns Voice]

Better call ...

[PPH]

.... Dr. Stone and his team.

Imperial

[Vlijmen Fileer]

"Foot" ?
Again? Seriously?? When will this braindead imperial insanity EVER stop???

Re:Imperial

[Anonymous Coward]

USA loves to be called imperium.
Seriously, /. should attempt to evolve a bit

Re:Imperial

[mrgren]

We'll stop using feet as soon as the Brits stop using stones.

Re:Imperial

[dkman]

The Republicans will never let us stop using the imperial system.

As long as the Republicans are allowed to gerrymander their seats in Congress we won't be able to get rid of them.

Congress will never pass a gerrymandering law because they are the ones who would need to vote on it.

Therefore we will ,unfortunately, never get rid of our egregious amount of BS.

What I would like to see:
Step 1: Stop gerrymandering
Step 2: Vote for someone with a clue
Step 3: Make speed limits and other products have both forms (imperial and metric)
Step 4: Phase out imperial
I'm fine with the process taking 40 or 50 years, but let's stop doing nothing.

Re:Imperial

[geekoid]

The problem with imperial units is that
before you know it, you're looking down the barrel of a Death Star.

Re:Imperial

[geekoid]

That was the plan. But, you know Reagan and his bogus budget cutting efforts.

Re:Imperial

[cusco]

And get rid of Daylight Savings Time.

Meteorite my ass

[wronkiew]

If that's a meteor crater, where's the ejecta? It must have excavated ~200 m3 of dirt, which seems to have simply disappeared. None of the plants surrounding it show any evidence of violent impact, "shockwave", or explosion as reported. Maybe there is actually a crater somewhere, but this is just a photo of some sort of sinkhole?

Re:Meteorite my ass

[tragedy]

Trees being uprooted by sinkholes tend to be falling into the hole, not away from it. It's hard to see in the photo, but that tree looks like it's had most, but not all leaves blown off it. As for where the ejecta vanished to, it looks like where it vanished to is the area immediately around the crater. We don't have any sort of before and after picture or a picture of another part of the same wooded area, but the part that we can see seems to be all dirt except for where there are taller trees. It might be the case that there's normally nothing but bare dirt visible, or it might be the case that all the ground covering vegetation is covered in the thick layer of ejected dirt. There also seem to some loose, recently deposited, rocks outside the crater.

Re:Meteorite my ass

[StripedCow]

We don't have any sort of before and after picture

You can find the "before" picture on google maps/earth of course.

Re:Meteorite my ass

[geekoid]

Did you look at the impact crater? YOU could easily spread that little dirt over the areas and it would not be noticeable.

I've seen tree hit by lightning and the near by bushes look un-touched.

Re: Meteorite my ass

[wronkiew]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The Nicaraguan govt spokesman says this was a meteorite that broke off 2014 RC. My claim requires only the presence of an over-excited and uninformed public servant.

Coward.

Re:Meteorite my ass

[wronkiew]

SpaceWeather.com is "skeptical", says it looks more like a hole dug by a backhoe than a meteor crater.

Re:Meteorite my ass

[tragedy]

I actually took a look at the airport in google maps to see if I could identify the spot. There isn't enough to go on from the article. Some parts seem to definitely have ground-covering vegetation between the trees, but it's less clear in other parts, where it does look fairly brown between the trees. That could just be brown vegetation, however. Overall, the ground in the pictures seems far too devoid of small plants close to the crater. I'm definitely thinking that there's a layer of dirt there covering everything.

Re:Meteorite my ass

[tragedy]

I found a few other pictures looking around and there's definitely a lot of plants angled away from the crater. It might not have been a meteorite, but it definitely looks like there was an explosion rather than just a backhoe digging.

Re:Meteorite my ass

[tragedy]

The photos showing soldiers in helmets and vests sweeping the area with metal detectors suggests that they have at least considered it as a possibility.

Re:Meteorite my ass

[wronkiew]

Yes, the better photos do show more effect on the plants.

Taste like chicken?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Do dinosaurs taste like chicken?

They ought to. Recent research has shown that chickens are the closest living relative of T. Rex.

Re:Taste like chicken?

[jc42]

Do dinosaurs taste like chicken?

They ought to. Recent research has shown that chickens are the closest living relative of T. Rex.

Really? Do you have a reference for the research?

If it's true that T.rex is closer to chickens than to pheasants, peafowl, and other Phasianinae, it would mean that the Phasianinae family dates back to before the K-T disaster. This would sorta imply a major reorg of the Therapsids, as well as the entire Aves class.

So it's be interesting to read about the research on this discovery.

Re:Taste like chicken?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Recent research has shown that chickens are the closest living relative of T. Rex.

Do you have a reference for the research?

If it's true that T.rex is closer to chickens than to pheasants, peafowl, and other Phasianinae, it would mean that the Phasianinae family dates back to before the K-T disaster.

This was all over the mainstream press last April. I was echoing their over-simplified characterizatoin of the research.

It's actually "closest living relative among the set of genetic databases they tested", I.e. chickens, sheep, etc. Chickens happened to be a bird they tested, with aminno acid sequences far closer to those of the collagen recovered from T. Rex - nearly identical, in fact, than those of things like mammals. So don't expect this to re-write taxonomy - or to mean that chickens were any closer - or farter - from T. Rex than their close relatives such as phesants.

Of course there's other evidence that birds were around well before T. Rex. So it may turn out that chickens are closer relatives to T. Rex than, say, bluebirds. (Or maybe bluebirds will turn out to be closer, once they're compared.)

Re:Taste like chicken?

[blivit42]

A quick google search turned up the following paper

I wouldn't go so far as to say that chicken is the closest living relative to the T-Rex, just that it is the closest in sequence similarity to this particular collagen protein, out of all of the protein sequences known in 2007 (chicken could have been the only bird represented in the database at the time, but I am not going to take the time to look into this).

I just searched the GVQGPPGPQGPR T-rex collagen sequence given in the text against the NCBI nr database, which is pretty comprehensive. It yielded the following Collagen alpha-1(I) chain perfect matches:

Brachylophosaurus canadensis [dinosaur]
Tyrannosaurus rex [dinosaur]

Sarcophilus harrisii [Tasmanian devil]
Monodelphis domestica [Gray short-tailed opossum]

Corvus brachyrhynchos [American crow]
Gallus gallus [Chicken]
Manacus vitellinus [Golden-collared manakin]
Pseudopodoces humilis [Ground tit]
Anas platyrhynchos [Mallard duck]
Geospiza fortis [Medium ground finch]
Acanthisitta chloris [Rifleman]
Columba livia [Rock dove]
Melopsittacus undulatus [Parakeet]
Falco peregrinus [Peregrine falcon]
Falco cherrug [Saker falcon]

So, that's 11 birds, 1 other dinosaur, and 2 mammals (one placental, one marsupial). The list gets bigger if we relax the sequence similarity cutoff. Based on this single fragment of a sequence, we can infer that T-rex is generally more closely related to birds than to mammals or lizards (and no lizards made the top-hit list), since there were a lot more bird matches than mammals (and the lack of mammal hits is likely not due to lack of sampling relative to birds). This is a big inference to make from a single fragment of a single protein, but I'm reasonably confident that further analysis of additional T-rex sequences would strengthen this finding.

If more sequences have been published since 2007, then perhaps we could get a better idea of which modern bird T-rex is most closely related to, but there is no way to determine this from just the single example sequence above. We cannot say with any confidence that T-rex is more related to chicken than to any other bird, unless a much more thorough analysis is performed using a lot more data. Perhaps this has already been done, but I haven't taken the time to hunt for additional literature.

Re:Taste like chicken?

[RockDoctor]

If more sequences have been published since 2007, then perhaps we could get a better idea of which modern bird T-rex is most closely related to,

On skeletal structure grounds, T.rex has been considered a sister group to all birds since the 1960s or so. On the basis of it's forearm structure, T.rex is a theropod dinosaur, but probably not a maniraptorinan theropod dinosaur. All birds however are considered maniraptorian theropod dinosaurs.

We don't have a good understanding of the initial evolutionary radiation of the birds, between approximately the early Late Jurassic and mid-Late Cretaceous, when we find evidence of the early roots of some modern bird groups such as the ratites. There's no particular reason to think that any modern bird is more closely related to T.rex than any other. There probably is one such, but we don't have (and are very unlikely to ever get) enough evidence to really be sure of the family tree to that degree of accuracy. It's like asking if Ronald Reagan is more closely related to Emperor Hirohito, Osama bin Laden, Otzi the Iceman, or Barak Obama.

I've forgotten what signature I'm using. Is it still the birds ARE one?

Re:Taste like chicken?

[RockDoctor]

I've forgotten what signature I'm using. Is it still the birds ARE one?

Evidently, yes. Appropriate. I haven't changed it for several years.

It's like asking if Ronald Reagan is more closely related to Emperor Hirohito, Osama bin Laden, Otzi the Iceman, or Barak Obama.

I suppose I should add an Australian Aborigine and an Amerindian to that list, just to even out the range supplied. Let's say Montezuma (he of the Revenge, for the Amerind) and Ernie Dingo (an Australian Aboriginal TV character, according to my Australian colleague).

Re:Global warming AND Bush did this.

[davester666]

Foreplay for George was sending people to Guantanamo

Re:Global warming AND Bush did this.

[Mike Frett]

And that is why Republicans always make Wars...

The real question is...

[geantvert]

... are Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman in holiday in Nicaragua?

Meterorite???

[messymerry]

Please explain to your effing media connections that it is an effing meteor unitl it effing stops...then, it's an effing meteorite... Can these so called effing reporters not learn any effing thing???