Russian boffins race to meteorite crash lake as shard prices go sky-high Russian boffins have struck out on their own to find fragments of the meteorite that exploded in the sky over Chelyabinsk on Friday morning - amid reports that pieces are fetching as much $10,000. An expedition found a crater in the ice over Lake Chebarkul, where the scientists believe pieces of the space rock landed. "The …
Are those metric or imperial tons.
Given that I am openly rebelling against the metric version of the ton, and never use the actual imperial ton, and some days can't remember how to spell the metric version, I just use "ton" for everything.
So given that the retards in Lockheed Martian, are the only dimwits left on the planet that use imperial, one could safely say that the ton, is the metric ton, with my spelling.
Ever since the most recent Royal Institute Christmas Lectures ( a TV show aimed at children, but hey, I still learn things) I've desired an acid-etched slice of an iron nickel meteorite called an octahedrite. They showed a large specimen. The etching brings out Widmanstätten patterns, which are beautiful and can't be faked- for them to occur, the rate of cooling through a certain temperature range is no more than 10ºC per million years.
Small samples are around £30 per gram.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octahedrite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widmanst%C3%A4tten_pattern
Reminds me of when I was at school we had a talk from one of the Lunar Astronauts. In questions afterwards someone asked if he'd been able to keep a bit of moon rock for himself - his answer was no and in any case moon rock just looked like any other rock so even if he had no-one would have known if it was actually from the moon rather than something he'd picked up in his yard!
Isn't there a mission planned, or perhaps completed, to unearth the remains/core of the lump that fell at Tunguska? The theory behind this being that the heat from the air-burst/core melted the permafrost below the surface and it's remains slipped, gracefully, down into the depths of an ancient marshland/swamp, where, after a time, the permafrost froze again and encapsulated it for posterity. Given the shallow angle of attack in this recent incident, one imagines that there should be a trail of debris, along with a still rather warn to the touch, core, resting at some depth, in, or below, the bottom of said lake/lakeside. Russian engineers are no slouches when it comes to drilling in sub-zero environs, but constructing a robust platform for that purpose might pose a problem. Good luck peeps.
The belief is that the Tunguska meteorite exploded in the atmosphere and so nothing actually made it to Earth.
Quite lucky really that it happened where it did, if it had happened over Europe - the loss of life could have been phenomenal.
Mind you if it had happened over Europe and the loss of life had been phenomenal, then we would probably have developed space defenses by now, and be off exploring and settling the other planets in the Solar System... Hmmm....
"Seems like a lot for an object roughly 55 feet in diameter, but I guess if its highly metallic then it makes sense...."
I think their estimate might be on the high side, or assuming a lot of metal content, but rock is surprisingly heavy!
http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/top50stones.htm
Granite is 2.75 tons per cubic meter.
I will admit, on wandering through Bath one day ( the ancestral city, home from in foreign) to find among the hippie stalls flogging joss sticks and Tibetan caps hand knitted from lentils, a bloke selling meteorite pieces.
All packaged: he was just retailing. Can't remember the name of the company at all but there really is someone out there packaging and grading fragments. Chondrite, nickel/iron, as I say, I can't remember the name of the two men and a dog company that was doing this but I do indeed recall standing gape mouthed in admiration at the sheer free market wondrousness of it.
It was a fiver or something for a few grammes of something not from this world.
A complete blinder as a business, I was seriously impressed.
"Next morning, a crowd gathered on the common, hypnotised by the unscrewing of the cylinder. Two feet of shining screw projected, when suddenly, the lid fell off..."
I need to catch a cold, and fast. Those bloboid bastards aren't injecting my blood into their own veins without a fight!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
