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Meteor Lights Up Southern Michigan (arstechnica.com)
New submitter Foundryman writes: Amidst fake missile reports in Hawaii and Japan, Michigan gets hit by something real. From a report via Ars Technica: "Early last night local time, a meteor rocketed through the skies of southern Michigan, giving local residents a dramatic (if brief) light show. It also generated an imperceptible thump, as the U.S. Geological Survey confirmed that there was a coincident magnitude 2.0 earthquake. The American Meteor Society has collected more than 350 eyewitness accounts, which ranged from western Pennsylvania out to Illinois and Wisconsin. They were heavily concentrated over southern Michigan, notably around the Detroit area. A number of people have also posted videos of the fireball online. The American Meteor Society estimates that the rock was relatively slow-moving at a sedate 45,000km an hour. Combined with its production of a large fireball, the researchers conclude it was probably a big rock. NASA's meteorwatch Facebook page largely agrees and suggests that this probably means that pieces of the rock made it to Earth. If you were on the flight path, you might want to check your yard.
That was BitCoin, going out in a flashbang blaze of glory. Turn out the lights, the party's over.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
>> imperceptible thump
Well, which was it?
For God's sake, it wasn't fake, it was false. Big difference. If it was fake, then it wasn't from legitimate sources. But it was from legitimate sources, so it was "fact". It was a false alarm, but it wasn't fake.
They only track (very) large objects. Such small object are tiny specs of dust until they're in our atmosphere. Scale matters.
hahaha! You should read NASA's website and learn the reality:
How good are we at finding and tracking NEOs?
Over 2015-2016, observers discovered more than 1500 previously unknown NEOs each year. Roughly half of the known catalogue of NEOs are objects larger than about 460 feet (140 meters) in size. The estimated population of NEOs of this size is about 25,000. Current surveys are finding NEOs of this size at a rate of about 500 per year.
The 460-foot cutoff point was established by a NASA NEO survey science definition team (SDT) in 2003. The SDT determined that impacts from objects of that size would only produce regional effects, while larger objects would have corresponding wider effects such as large sub-global effects from impacts of a 984-foot (300-meter) object and global effects from 0.6 mile (1-kilometer) object impacts. In 2016, NASA appointed a new NEO survey SDT to reevaluate this cutoff point in light of research conducted and events occurring since 2003. The new SDTâ(TM)s recommendations should be available in 2017.
Ground-based telescopes alone have limitations - for instance, they can only survey the skies at night and in clear skies. Based on statistical population estimates, about 74 percent of NEOs larger than 460 feet still remain to be discovered.
What can be done to improve the NEO detection rate?
Larger ground-based telescopes and a dedicated space-based infrared asteroid survey telescope would substantially increase the discovery rate and meet the goal in the NASA Authorization Act of 2005 to detect, track, catalogue, and characterize the physical characteristics of 90 percent of the NEO population down to 140 meters in size. NASAâ(TM)s currently operating NEOWISE space-based survey was not designed for this purpose. NEOWISE is a repurposed astrophysics spacecraft, and while it has made significant contributions to NEO discovery and characterization, its capabilities are limited.
from: https://www.nasa.gov/planetary...
Specks leave a thin streak. Ones that pop with a flash like that one are probably a few pounds to a few tens of pounds of loose material. If it was lighter it wouldn't be so bright, if it was heavier it would be far more impressive, and if it was more solid it would bounce off the atmosphere or make it to ground.
NASA is working on tracking potentially dangerous asteroids, but is limited in what they can track by funding. They have projects to track the large asteroids (i.e. ones capable of destroying a country), but no funding to track all of the smaller ones. An asteroid 100 m across can make a big dent when it lands, but is difficult to find at 100 million km.
This video shows the rate at which asteroids (some of which are near-Earth objects) are discovered.