HYPERSONIC METEOR smashes into Russia, injuring hundreds Up to 500 people* are believed to be injured after a meteorite blazed through the sky and smashed into central Russia this morning. The space rock, estimated by the Russian Academy of Sciences to weigh about 10,000 tons, hit the atmosphere at a speed of at least 54,000km/h and is believed to have shattered around 30 to 50 km …
Yes, it's big, but not quite as big as the Mercator projection suggests.
You might look at a Gall-Peter projection to align yourself with more accurate relative realities.
Or entertain/educate yourself here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection
* Bootnote: The political aspects of the Gall-Peters projection were part of a West Wing episode
Africa isn't a country, it's a continent. If someone says that "Russia gets more metorites", you can't say "No, Africa gets more"... it's an unfair comparison. If they said "Asia gets more", then that would be valid.
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_total_area
"If it landed at anything like vertical. Wow. Goodnight!"
Not really.
It was total energy wise a few hundred kilotonnes.
Unless it hit a populated area, it would be a lot less than many atomic tests.
Its STILL got to do a lot of atmosphere penetration even at 90 degrees to the surface.
What is wrong with the morons?
NOW is the time to have the nukes converted for deep space, long range missions, and to get the technology and the kill / deflection into the sun rates right up into the 100% mark.
It's no use sitting on our collective arses until one day when the "Telescope Tommies" say, "Ohhhhhhhh Nooooooooo - this is going to hit annnnnnnd it's a REAL big one. How long till it hits? Mmmmmmm about 5 days."
Of course while we have had tens of thousands of nukes sitting in the silos for 50 years, doing nothing more than making profits for the banks and the military industrial complex.....
Meanwhile thousands and thousands of these "sucker punch" asteroids go coasting by silently through the darkness of space - ever so close.... ever so temptingly close.
Just waiting to wipe us all out....
Unless we wipe them out first.
The afterthought - or the people who need to be kicked into the gutter and left there.
But as I may add, there really are dumb fucks who think that having half a continent wiped out, and decades of shit in the atmosphere to wipe out most of the rest, is of less importance than the odd nuke fucking up....
Ok generally I think I agree, but the part where you claim nukes sitting in silos make profit for someone... they're a sunk investment (literally), paid for once, with most of the maintenance work being to keep them clean and dry. Most of them don't even have fuel in unless the US is on extremely high alert because it tends to leak out of the vents and corrode the tanks. By and large the only people making any money from a nuclear silo are the electricity companies.
Interestingly, "duck and cover" is actually good advice here as well as in nuclear attacks and this event illustrates why _perfectly_.
People were injured by glass debris. If you saw the flash from inside and stared out the window while your friend ducks and covers, only one of you is going to get a shitload of glass in your face.
Nuclear bombs shit out lots of radiating. The flux drops off with the inverse square law, while the atmosphere in the device's vicinity is superheated and rushes outward. In a small area, everyone will die; in a much, much larger area, people staring at it will get a face full of glass, photons and more. They will be scalded, blind and cut while anyone who ducks and covers will not. If it has a moderate effect on the building, people under desks will be safer.
In short; the vast majority of people effected by a given nuclear detonation _will_ be better off if they duck and cover. Unless you know factually that you're in the minority of people who are 100% auto-screwed – and you don't – it is totally legit to duck and cover.
Mushroom cloud, because, boom.
"IIRC they mothballed one for "emergency" re-commissioning"
I think that's from a Family Guy episode.
The shuttle is not for emergencies even when the program is fully active; it is very complicated and time consuming to prepare it for launch and sensitive to weather. Delays are rampant. Even when the fleet was live, it could take months to prepare a shuttle for flight and it usually would not do so immediately.
Which is fine for what it is, but what it isn't for is emergencies.
If they wanted to rush one up right now and money were no object, I'd bet it'd take 1 year absolute minimum and have a high risk of loss of mission or crew.
Finallly; the Shuttle cannot do missions beyond low earth orbit. It only has about 300 m/second of delta-v. This is about 1/10 what the Apollo CSM could do. Intercepting an asteroid is even harder. When one is _passing_ by the Earth you'd have to get up past Earth escape velocity. If it's coming _at_ the Earth, things get much hairier.
Again, totally OK for what it is, but what it isn't for is intercepting asteroids.
"And who the f**k made the decision to decommission the shuttle fleet?"
Investment banks - when they attempted to trouser all our money by gambling that they could make a killing on flipping sub-prime mortgage backed securities before the regulators got around to actually questioning what the hell these securities were anyway.
Global economic crash. Re-think on public spending.
"them coming from completely different directions?"
Might be an alien asteroid defense system? perhaps they've been firing 'meteors' at the asteroid for years trying to stop it crashing into their planet/ space station sometime in the future. I expect more of these hitting the earth over the next day or two.
even if they came in different directions it doesn't rule out them being part of the same cluster.
Space time is curved remember so one of the space rocks in the cluster could have fallen out and swooped away and back round the Earth like a boomerang making it look like they came in different directions.
"Apart from the different direction, the asteroid arrives 18 hours after the meteorite strike."
that kind of confirms my swooping theory. If an asteroid swooped you'd expect it to get here first.
Don't get all "space time is curved" on us.
If they're in a moving group then they're subject to roughly the same forces and will follow the same trajectory. If an asteroid "swooped" – they don't, by the way – you'd expect everything traveling with it to swoop along with. Unless, of course, they're not the same cluster.
Gravity is not selective. It drops with the inverse square law and at these scales and distances the gravity gradient is irrelevant to a cluster of meteoroids. It's not going to pluck one out and send it on some winding path.
*Ahem* yourself. Have you never played Meteors/Asteroids? You shoot at one big one a bit, and suddenly you have four small ones, at least one of which zips off the screen to the right, then hits you coming from the left.
See? It's perfectly possible for bits of one meteor to come in from totally different directions. It also shows that you're not done once you've shot the big lump, you have to hit all the debris as well. And the alien ship that comes in firing randomly when you're too slow, and the small alien ship that comes firing at you when you're too slow hitting the big ships.
"On a more serious note this might be a good advertisement to increase near earth orbit funding"
It's just the universe's gentle reminder that everyone clinging to the same small rocky planet isn't a safe bet. (civilisation wise)
Now, must go sort out some off planet backups for my data.
It was Iran's failed dog rocket.
North Korean satellite thats now failed.
Israel's Anti missile rocket that misfired.
One of American/Russian spy satellite disintegrated.
Jesus angry at Pope resigning.
Aliens are testing their arrival velocity.
Martian revenge and anger at "Curiosity's" intrusion on their planet.
add more.....
Generally cancer is not normally the cause of death is it? Organ failure tends to be the cause of death - cancer just causes the organ failure. I've always found it very inconsistent what they write down sometimes as the cause of death - for instance:
My dad died of a heart attack, but while trying to give him mouth to mouth - he had some toast stuck in his throat - so the likely conclusion was that he choked and that caused a heart attack. His cause of death was a heart attack (not choking). In Hollyoaks Esther was at risk of death from renal failure - had she died - they would of classed the cause of death as renal failure and not "bullying" which caused the renal failure.
So as you can see - cancer causing organ failure should therefore not be listed as the cause of death - the cause of death is organ failure.
> Not if you die from hyperoxia.
Yes, even if you "die from hyperoxia".
There are two main types of hyperoxia - the Lorraine Smith effect and the Paul Bert effect.
The Lorraine Smith effect basically causes the lungs to give up. So even though there's loads of O2 in yuor lungs, there's very little in your brain.
The Paul Bert effect causes fitting. It's not excessively dangerous unless the fit causes other problems - the most commonplace, I believe, being loss of breathing apparatus underwater. There's also other possibilities, such as head injuries resulting from the fit. All of these cause a lack of oxygen being delivered to the brain (possibly because of a lack of blood being delivered to the brain).
So yes - nice quip, but not actually true...
Vic.
1. The trajectory across the sky was almost horizontal. It should have been vertical.
2. It could be seen to be moving. If it truly was from space then it would be travelling at kms per second.
3. While it would leave some vapour contrail, there was too much smoky contrail left undispersing in the sky.
It was a plane.
Trajectory - vertical would mean that it was aimed directly at the centre of the Earth from a very, very, very long way away. Horizontal means it skimmed it (more likely with a space object) and was caught in its gravity. You said the word yourself - TRAJECTORY. A straight trajectory in any direction around a gravity-pulling mass is very suspicious indeed.
Perspective. You have no idea how far up it is, nor what speed it was doing. As a human, you can't judge 20-40mph by a (silent) car that passes in front of you. You could TAP the car at the right time, but you can't tell how fast it was going. Or else we'd need no speed cameras. As you get further away, the effect of your judgement gets worse. Planes fly at hundreds of miles per hour but sometimes you can barely see them move. By comparison, I was literally chasing Jupiter around the eyepiece of my telescope last night because it wouldn't stay fixed for more than a few seconds and I didn't have my equatorial mount set up correctly.
Vapour contrail? Who says its vapour? And, even then, a plane leaves a contrail due to the exhaust heat (and sometimes just the movement of the air over an aerofoil), not because of what it burns. I'm guessing something travelling fast enough to break up rock in the atmosphere might get a little warmer than a plane's exhaust. It's literally boiling the water in the atmosphere as it comes in.
Please, please, please... before you run off on mad conspiracy theories, check your facts. Go on Wikipedia, for a start, and look at what forms a contrail, why it would look like that, etc. Presenting "facts" like this just makes you look an idiot.
It's literally boiling the water in the atmosphere as it comes in.
A masterly understatement. It's literally boiling the iron or whatever that it's made of. It's probably going past that, all the way to plasma. Afterwards, the iron, silicon, whatever condenses (as oxide, mostly) and hence the thick trail.
If you watch the car footage you can actually see the trail appearing to burn for a few seconds. I expect that's a Nitrogen - Oxygen fire, or possibly or additionally an Oxygen - Iron fire if the meteor was iron.
One of the worries prior to testing the first nuclear bomb was that it would ignite an (exothermic) Oxygen - Nitrogen combustion, that some thought might propagate to consume the Earth's entire atmosphere and everything living therein. I wonder if someone else pointed out that were that possible, a meteor strike would have done it long ago? Or did they just chance it?
"Should have been vertical". You must be a troll. No-one can be that thick around here, surely?
Almost horizontal means that its intersect with the Earth just clipped our atmosphere. Dumped most of its energy at a decent altitude. Bloody good thing too. If that had come in much closer to vertical it would have been far more destructive of whatever was underneath.
Not to mention that, even if the thing was coming in exactly vertical, you and the ground you're standing on are whizzing past at almost 1700 km/h due to the Earth's rotation (OK, maybe a little slower in Russia, but still...), which would skew the apparent trail quite a bit.
""Should have been vertical". You must be a troll. No-one can be that thick around here, surely?"
They most certainly can. For example the general calibre of comment on anything that has a US political or nationalistic element is always absolutely dire. I want separate forums for Reg comments. Mandatory membership of the US commentard forum for all the Yanks + Eadon and his ilk, and "Rest of World" for everybody else, where we generally have normal ratios of idiots to normal people.
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>US: slightly under 1 per million.
>UK: about 1.8 per million
Might have something to do with European bias from the Scandinavian selectors. The better question may be to look at the nationality of the universities they went to and taught at instead. UK is pretty solid in this regard also. Still by the nobel per capita measure you do get a pretty funky list in general. The only thing that stands out is the lack of muslim countries on the top of list.
— Faroe Islands 1 49,483 202.090
01 Saint Lucia 2 162,178 123.321
02 Luxembourg 2 509,074 39.287
03 Iceland 1 313,183 31.930
04 Sweden 29 9,103,788 31.855
05 Switzerland 25 7,925,517 31.544
06 Denmark 14 5,543,453 25.255
07 Austria 20 8,219,743 24.332
08 Norway 11 4,707,270 23.368
09 United Kingdom 119 63,047,162 18.875
10 Timor-Leste 2 1,143,667 17.488
11 Ireland 7 4,722,028 14.824
12 Israel 10 7,590,758 13.174
13 Germany 103 81,305,856 12.668
14 Netherlands 19 16,730,632 11.356
15 United States 338 314,976,000 10.731
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Anyone else noticed that in all the videos we've seen of this, neither pedestrians or drivers seem at all fazed by the sight of a massive fireball screaming across the sky.
In the vid here in the story, couple of people shuffling across the road, briefly glance up at it, carry on shuffling. And while I don't speak Russian, the people in the car seem extremely calm, no raised voices screaming "какого хрена это?!?!?!?!?!"
My thought too. Are Russians completely unflappable, or is it a language where excitement is conveyed through choice of words rather than tone of voice?
It's even more noticeable in the other video, of people when the shockwave arrives and smashes loads of windows.
In 30 years in the UK it will be illegal to build steps outside without putting some kind of shelter above them to prevent rain wetting them. Steps will considered a health and safety hazard in general. Buildings will convert outdoor steps to very long and gentle slopes with soft padding and gripping surfaces as well as erecting shelters to cover them.
According to a friend, it seems that in-car recorders are now required by law in Russia, given the incredibly extreme traffic accidents they have there. The cams are used to determine who's actually guilty, and so the "Russian car crash" video collections were born. Recently, one of such cams gave us a first-person view of that plane crashing into a highway incident.
Having trouble getting in, with his visa, seing as he is a foreigner there, and battling his interesting addiction maybe? ;) God knows how he could have noticed anything but Tea Leoni, though. Bit like Tiger Woods really, maybe we all want to slum it a bit to get in touch with our inner caveman ;)
Current estimates put the lower limit on the meteor's mass prior to entering the atmosphere at 7000 ton, or 1666.67 kiloJubs. For a more manageable number, that's about 350 brontosauruses (thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the other end. Eeechhhum), one Eiffel Tower, or just over one-tenth of the Firth of Forth bridge
people on the street claim that there must have been something else than a space rock - as soon as they were reassured, by all authorities, including Herr Putin, that it was just a space rock, nothing to worry about, go back to your piles of rubble, no, it wasn't a rocket test gone wrong, absolutely not :)
But observers on video knew immediately "wtf huge meteorite" etc. Almost as if they had - shock- seen one before and knew what they were looking at.
Missiles dont generally pile into Earth at bizarre shallow angles at multi-kilometres per second in absolutely "straight and flat* trajectories. There is a reason they are called "ballistic" missiles usually....
made in Poland:
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/5223/47u348.jpg
(in loose translation: "It fucking hit, so it fucking did, but wtf probe it deeper?"
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5880761/images/mamy_kaski.jpg
(no worries, we've got hard hats on)
but it's hard to say whether this is to portray the Russians, or (optimistic, as always) Poles :)
There was an magnitude 6.6 earthquake in Russia yesterday. It clearly shows on the seismograph shown in this news. The meteor is the small blip at the 03:00 UTC (GMT) line.
Details on the magnitude 6.6 earthquake can be found here, http://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/earthquake.php?id=304735
There was a question about why this always seems to happen in Russia.
It's because of its proximity to polar aperture.
Grab a globe -- the kind that spins. Look for the part They don't want you do see. Yes. Right there. Under the pivot point, hidden by the brass disk. (If you have an inflatable globe, it's where the air fill hole is.) The north one is the Polar Aperture, where the flying saucers land and come from when they visit the hollow sphere that is earth. Every century or so there is a bad landing and Russia gets hit.
Of course The Sexiest Man Alive, Kim Jong Un, will claim this is one of his. But you now know the truth.
On any of these videos you find of the meteor explosion, every other word that is spoke in Russian is cursing.
Put yourself in their position. Would you look up and say; "Good grief! There appears to be an enormous meteorite flying overhead.........my, that was a loud noise, wasn't it?" or "FUCK ME! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? LOOK AT THE FUCKING SIZE OF THAT BASTARD........JESUS H FUCKING CHRIST, THE BLOODY THING JUST BLEW UP!!!111!!!!"
Comets approach the Sun from any direction but asteroids generally orbit close to the ecliptic plane. Therefore, a goodly number of meteors that collide with earth enter the earth's atmosphere from the ecliptic.
Meteors enter the earth's atmosphere relatively parallel to the Equator and travel from west to east. Russia has the greatest east/west width on earth. It is 12 contiguous time zones wide.. Meteors traveling over the Northern Hemisphere between the proper latitudes travel over Russia where they have a greater chance of hitting. Countries without a long east/west dimension but of equal square milage do not capture as many meteorites as Russia.
In essence, Russia owes it's success to the fact it is a very long rectangle with rounded corners.
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1957AuJPh..10...77W&db_key=AST&page_ind=0&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_VIEW&classic=YES
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Wow, don't you hate these type of coincidences? It could indicate nothing or something downright upsetting.
Perhaps the Russian impact was part of some failed probe aimed at 2012 DA14? Or something jumping off it (in the spirit of hitch-hiking a ride) at a way earlier stage to check out the solar system first? Or we're entering a phase where we will have asteroids and meteorites hitting with greater frequency for some reason.
So it would be a good idea to investigate the impact of material, analysing samples and so on. And can we get a serious calculation on what the chances are on a random one-day window for a close asteroid fly-by and a sizeable meteorite blowing up in the atmosphere? Are there any numbers out there about these things?
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