Slashdot Mirror
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.
A cow might have died.
>> a meteorite strike in India killed a man and injured three others
Isn't that a level 9 spell? Were there any related "prismatic", er, rainbow attacks in the area too?
It's sad for his family and condolences. But man, what a unique way to go! Probably high up on my list of ways to go. No pain, no fear, just one minute you're there and the next your in the history books for being one of the few to be taken out by a meteorite.
Only with brimstone. Otherwise, it's just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
You can do everyone one a favor and make it 7 billion - 1.
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.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Was he wearing a dinosaur suit, by chance?
Table-ized A.I.
Was wondering why I didn't receive a call back from Bob in customer service.
...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
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Given the small impact crater (60cm according to CNN) and the police statement that they have a piece of whatever fell to earth this seems unlikely to be a meteorite to me. If it was big enough to leave remains, and moving as fast as a meteor then I don't see how the crater could be so small. More likely IMO to have been a bit of space junk from one of the many satellites and stuff up there.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
I prefer to imagine that God chose to smite a random Indian bus driver out of all the people in the world that he could have used a hurtling space rock on.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I have a few exercises I give my students in which they have to make a guess at a quantity and then make a calculation to back it up. My favorite: If you marked off a tract of land in a 3x3 foot grid, and one person stood at each intersection, how many square miles would accommodate the entire world population, and what would be a country of comparable size?
Of course, after doing the calculation, one might ponder what it would smell like...
Nah. If that crater was caused by a small meteorite it wasn't travelling at a few hundred miles an hour. If the ejecta had sufficient energy to maim and kill, either the meteorite has transferred momentum from it's great mass or great velocity (or a useful combination of both). Let's try and bury the old Slashdot shibboleth about how meteorites just fall to earth like stones from the top of the Empire State building. More than willing to hear from somebody better equipped.
A meteorite entering at as near damn vertical to the atmosphere will take less than 10 seconds to plough through the last 60 miles (100k), if you fully discount deceleration just for the moment (not going all Calculus). If it starts in at a reasonable 25000mph, roughly 40000km/h, (on the low side for these things) that pissy bit of atmospheric braking has a job to do. a = v-u/t . That looks like a deceleration of 4X10^6 m/sec/sec to me. It's not an even deceleration of course because there isn't a whole lot of atmospheric density until the last 20k. Now the good old gravity thing adds 9.0 m/sec/sec to the acceleration side of the equation making it that bit harder to slow this thing down to a few m/sec constant velocity at some reasonable undefined height above ground. The outcome required would be a "survivor" saying "who threw that" vs a "bystander" saying 'did that guy just blow up"?
It is reasonable to argue that ablation removes momentum so we probably can't get any further until we can find useful figures that allow a back of hand calculation for loss of mass. I suppose we'd need to define a standard mass/velocity (momentum) required at the Earth's surface to maim somebody and go backward from there.
The terminal velocity argument needs a lot more definition of its parameters IMHO.
Some sort of committee is needed to eventually, after much debate, to lay down the basis for further investigation.
Small has to be defined. (Smaller than Wolf Creek impactor isn't sufficient)
Angle of entry to the atmosphere has to be defined. ("Any angle that delivers my proposed outcome" kind of lacks force of argument).
If this thing is to be funded I suspect it is necessary to investigate how this type of incident, something, something, climate change.
You know, this guy has given his given his life for science and saved us a whole lot of future bother. Next time somebody states that a meteorite won't kill you - just post the picture of the hole.
The True Story of History's Only Known Meteorite Victim
"On a clear afternoon in Sylacauga, Alabama (see map), in late November 1954, Ann was napping on her couch, covered by quilts, when a softball-size hunk of black rock broke through the ceiling, bounced off a radio, and hit her in the thigh, leaving a pineapple-shaped bruise..."
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Boko Haram and ISIS are not predators they are prey. The real predators are the various spec op teams on the hunt around the world. These predators are also capable of designating targets for "meteor strikes"
It bounced off of Trump's hair.