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

Actually, the picture is of the first crater...

[rgbatduke]

...as one can easily see. This is a crater in the middle of a paddy field. The regular array of tufts of greener is planted rice. The crater is order of a meter across or maybe a bit less (scale from the array of rice plants) and is formed in soft paddy mud that has had all of the rocks and solid material removed over as many as hundreds of years. This strike didn't kill anyone.

From the article, the second strike was near a tank -- which is basically a large open well sometimes surrounded by or even formed out of stone or masonry, typically NOT located in the middle of a muddy, flooded rice paddy -- injured several people and killed one, which means that it had more energy than the rice paddy strike and likely hit ground solid enough to cause significant shrapnel. A rice paddy is pretty close to a perfect environment to NOT cause a lot of shrapnel.

Just sayin'. I'm guessing the newspaper had a stock photo of the first hit and figured most people would be too ignorant to detect the "error" and wanted to be first to press to get wider reading and didn't wait on somebody going to photograph the actual crater.

rgb

Re:Wrong image in second link?

[lazarus]

Bad Astronomy talks about the odds of getting killed by one as 1:700,000. But this includes extinction events, etc. You are more likely to die by meteorite than terrorist apparently.

I couldn't find any odds of getting hit by one, never mind two falling in the same area within the space of a couple of weeks, but I think it would be much lower than getting hit by lightning (1:960,000). About 500 meteorites hit the earth each year. There are 138 million lightning strikes per year. So, not accounting for population density, I would estimate that your odds of getting hit by a meteorite is 1:265,000,000,000 (1 in 265 billion).

Roughly.