Meteorite Strike Kills Man In India

knwny writes: In what is believed to be the first such incident in modern times, a meteorite strike in India killed a man and injured three others. According to police sources, a loud blast was heard at the site of the strike which also left a four-feet deep crater. Preliminary investigation by forensic and bomb experts showed no sign of any explosive substance at the scene. The second link has a picture of the supposed crater which I believe will interest Slashdotters with experience in this area.

Comments

Wrong image in second link?

[Nidi62]

CNN shows a roped off area in what appears to be a small thicket, while the second link shows a crater in a rice paddy. If you read the article in the second link, the 4th paragraph mentions another incident believed to be a meteorite struck a rice paddy on Jan 26. So the caption on that image is probably incorrect.

Re:Wrong image in second link?

[amicusNYCL]

This is what happens when an object breaks up and the pieces strike a planet, you get a line of impacts. If these fragments both came from the same object then they would have to be very far apart, so the breakup of the object would have happened long ago, and even so they still probably wouldn't strike in the same place. The Earth is not stationary, the equator is rotating at around 1,000 miles per hour and the planet is moving through space at 67,000 miles per hour. So for 2 impact events that occur 11 days apart, you're talking about the earth moving over 17 million miles through space during that time and completing around 11 rotations. If you think that these fragments came from the same object then you're talking about something that must have been in geosynchronous orbit, where the object was orbiting the planet roughly above the area where they came down (probably a little "farther"), and it took one fragment 11 days longer than the other to fall from orbit. They've already identified rocks as belonging to the object that fell, so we aren't talking about man-made space junk, and there aren't any rocky satellites in geosynchronous orbit. In fact, the only rocky satellite in orbit around the planet is the moon, and it is most definitely not in a geosynchronous orbit. The odds are anything but "very high".