Did you look up? New Year's Day boom over Pittsburgh was exploding meteor, says NASA The loud boom heard over the skies of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on New Year’s Day was due to an exploding meteor with the blast energy equivalent to 30 tons of TNT, NASA has confirmed. People in the southwestern parts of the US city reported hearing a thunderous roar and feeling the ground shake and windows rattle just before …
"Sonic booms formed by exploding meteors are quite rare, according to the American Meteor Society."
Technically there is a 'boom' from an exploding meteor, not a sonic boom!
A sonic boom can be produced by a meteor prior to it exploding (or hitting the ground) while it is travelling faster than the speed of sound. But at the point when (if) it explodes it will just produce an ordinary everyday boom.
Wow, it's been a long time! Cold War era, first paying job. I was a sysadmin for some folks doing computational fluid dynamics in the Mach 40 region. The big difference in a nutshell is that you really can't entirely model the atmosphere as a gas anymore. You wind up treating it at least partially as a random cloud of various molecules and (violently ionized) atoms. Molecules are being torn up and are recombining into other things, so it's not a constant-molar process across the vehicle. The Navier-Stokes equations start breaking down under those circumstances. Solutions in our group were mostly from something that my naive eye would classify as a Finite Differences simulation. There was a guy doing Monte Carlo simulations - he produced impressively predictive results (I was told) but it was one of those codes that ran for three or four weeks at a time on a Sun 3/280. This was openly published - if I can remember names I could probably find some citations. Cannot remember Monte Carlo Guy's surname for the life of me...
Icon because that's some non-trivial energy levels you got there, buddy. :-)
Thanks - I was pretty confident that fluid dynamics breaks down at that sort of speed - which possibly does prevent anything so coherent as a sonic boom.
I (idly) wonder whether that's a feature of the transition from supersonic to hypersonic... I don't imagine the underlying physics changes much from Mach 20 to Mach 100, although having any projectile survive at those higher speeds might make for a challenging testing regime.
"Surely there must be some that score a bullseye, straight down? "
The problem is that these are only IN the atmosphere for a few seconds (100 miles max) , vs the ones that slide along it for a few thousand miles - and most of the time they're going to hit water
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