Living in the country, there are lots of long boring drives where you mind wanders and you grow up very familiar with what a "shooting star" looks like streaking against the night sky.
One day, driving home I happened to look out at something I thought was a plane and nearly drove off the road as I saw a meteroid falling silently through the sky. There was absolutely no sound and it moved much slower than I expected. After I regained control of my car and pulled it over to get out and watch, I saw small pieces silently broke away and the light show continued until it went over the horizon. It was totally unlike anything I'd ever seen before or since. It's dreamlike and beautiful.
I waited a few minutes after it went below the horizon since the angle it went on made me think it might have made it to the ground, but I never heard anything. It was never in the news, and nobody talked about it afterwards, for all I know I'm the only one who ever saw it. It was both terrifying and amazing. I had no idea what I was looking at since it didn't look like any picture of this phenomenon I'd ever seen.
One thing I'm sure of, is that I've never seen a video that ever does such a spectacle justice. There's so many subtle details that get completely obliterated on video.
Here's some video that do a pretty good job of showing what they look like.
The videos of the one in Russia are on an entirely different scale. The sonic boom was tremendous, the amount of light being thrown off of that thing was unbelievable. Extrapolating from what I saw and how I now know video changes things, this must have been an unbelievable beautiful and terrifying sight.
Wow, those videos (and your story) are mindblowing.
I wonder what must have gone through the minds of our ancestors when, hundreds or thousands of years ago, they'd witness such events (let alone ones similar to the Russian meteor). A lot of old creation myths etc. make a lot more sense now :)
Nice coverage. I especially like the infrasound analysis. The estimate of 100kT explosion suggests this thing was an order of magnitude scarier in person than it was on video, and it was pretty damn scary on video.
Now.we.know why we need meteor defense. If this rock ( that is.actually small ) ended hitting a 10 millions people city filled with glassy skyscrapers, what would happen? How many people.dead or in hospitals?
No, meteor defense can get in line behind heart disease, automobiles, suicide, gun violence, war, police, and all the other things astronomically (heh) more likely to kill people, therefore more deserving of our attention.
Not to mention the infrastructure damage(not that i am belittling human damage). It would take years and billions of dollars to repair. Imagine every window in New York blowing out?
The secondary damage would be much worse then primary.
Wouldn't the real problem with this be special interests? The country who develops it will not want to give it up to the rest of the world for obvious reasons.
It's pretty fortuitous that so many folks in Russia have dashboard cams. I've got to think this is a meteor impact that has the most independent, distributed points of view that were dutifully recorded.
They keep saying "explosion" but was there actually one? There was a sonic boom, and the rock disintegrated in the atmosphere, but I've not seen any evidence that it exploded all at once.
EDIT: well, lots of news agencies are using the word "exploded", so maybe it did. I see somebody else mentioned claims that Russians shot at it, but I'm skeptical that they'd be able to notice and react to this thing in time.
EDIT EDIT: OK so it looks like space rocks "airbursting" is not unheard of: [0]. Really curious what the physics of that involves.
Is is not an oxidized detonation explosion in the traditional sense, it's a hypersonic solid-gas fragmentation impact.
In this case, the most intense period involves peak pressure. The meteor falls down, encountering gradually thicker air, heating up and heating up, until finally, the pressure and differential internal stresses are sufficient to separate it into smaller pieces.
These smaller pieces are a lot less massive per surface area, so the pressure acting on them is going to be a lot more relative to their mass, and they are going to slow down much faster. The deceleration while this is going on, then, is going to induce sufficient turbulence to break them up even faster. So the breakup occurs in a sort of chain reaction, and the pressure waves from nearby fragments influence each other, adding turbulence and slowing the cloud of fragments further, until it all ends up as small particles spread over a large area. These particles are moving for the first fraction of a second of their life at supersonic velocities, generating a very large pocket of vacuum / shockwave as they dissipate their energies. The rapid expansion of the largest highly vulnerable layer of the asteroid into a cloud of dust thus constitutes an 'explosion', even if the energy is all kinetic instead of the slow chemical burning that happens afterwards as the white-hot particles oxidise & turn to ash.
Asteroids are not uniform, however. Wrap a chunk of granite in a chunk of sandstone, and you may end up chipping off bits of the sandstone for 10s, heating up until all the white-hot sandstone flies off in fragments at once for 2s, and then the granite flying further towards the ground until its yield strength is exceeded in a higher pressure regime, or it impacts the ground. With complex structures, multiple waves of fragmentation are possible, and rather than being a simple matter of the fragments immediately dissipating into small particles and a harder core, a meteor will tend to split into chunks which themselves become smaller examples of this phenomena.
EDIT: Just saw Bill Nye explain this on the DA14 webcast from planetary.org. When the meteor hits the atmosphere at such a high velocity, it's like hitting a brick wall and it explodes on impact. Then the shock wave propagates to the ground as the fragments fall and oxidize.
NASA's just confirmed this story on their twitter feed.
>>>@NASA #RussianMeteor is largest reported meteor since Tunguska event. Impact was at 3:20:26 UTC. Still being measured. More info to come.
That is an interesting point, If this had travelled over one of the poles would we have noticed? I tend to think that someone would have seen it, but we wouldn't have a dozen dash cam videos of it.
Its interesting coincidence i suppose that there is going to be a close flyby of a near earth asteroid on Feb 15th. Even google changed their doodle to remind that (but the doodle is gone now!)
Can anyone comment on why we don't have a handful satellites sprinkled with cameras pointing at all directions orbiting the Earth and feeding data down for analysis? Perhaps it's not much, but something is better than nothing. The excuse that this meteor wasn't spotted because it came from the sun side is laughable.
There are a lot of asteroids in the Solar System. Millions. The solar system is huge. It's not laughable that this one wasn't seen - it was extremely tiny.
Most asteroids that we can detect we do not have the technology to deflect unless we discover them decades before impact. Even then, deflecting them is all theoretical and would be a monumental technological undertaking, as it has never been attempted before.
Sounds like a wonderful Kickstarter project. Seriously though, the cost/benefit ratio isn't worth it for detecting stuff this small. "Worst in 100 years" and there was virtually no damage.
And there was no link to the other meteor that passed earth today ??. Or did Nasa coverup that it didnt knew what trajectory it would take. It seams unlikely to me that those two events are not related.
I mean recently Nasa found some anomaly on Mars too, and then they say "no its not interesting its just erosion; (mars has next to none atmospheric pressure btw) i mean if i where a geologist, then any curious shape even if it was made by erosion would attract my attention i would take samples; and most likely such samples would be more interesting then dust-hole digging. What has become from NASA i wonder. Once they where explorers curious.. now they only call their device curiosity
> Are there certain geographies or areas that are more prone to these incidents than others?
No. An incoming meteor or asteroid is perfectly ecumenical with respect to location, therefore the vast majority of meteors fall into the oceans.
On a related note, the best time to see meteors is between midnight and dawn in whatever location you find yourself. The reason? At dawn, if you look straight up, you're looking in the direction Earth is moving in its orbit at thirty kilometers per second. By contrast, if you look straight up at sunset, you're looking at where Earth has just been and is receding from at thirty kilometers per second. Earth's velocity is added to that of the wandering space rocks near dawn, but is subtracted at sunset.
It's unfortunate this event is a wake up call. 99% of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are unknown. We at the B612 Foundation (http://b612foundation.org) are building a telescope for early warning detection. Everyone can get involved. Please visit our site to learn more... you can help!
Russian state TV claims that the meteor was intercepted by an anti-ballistic missile system, which (if true) means the meteor was struck by a 10kt nuclear warhead.
[+] [-] bane|13 years ago|reply
One day, driving home I happened to look out at something I thought was a plane and nearly drove off the road as I saw a meteroid falling silently through the sky. There was absolutely no sound and it moved much slower than I expected. After I regained control of my car and pulled it over to get out and watch, I saw small pieces silently broke away and the light show continued until it went over the horizon. It was totally unlike anything I'd ever seen before or since. It's dreamlike and beautiful.
I waited a few minutes after it went below the horizon since the angle it went on made me think it might have made it to the ground, but I never heard anything. It was never in the news, and nobody talked about it afterwards, for all I know I'm the only one who ever saw it. It was both terrifying and amazing. I had no idea what I was looking at since it didn't look like any picture of this phenomenon I'd ever seen.
One thing I'm sure of, is that I've never seen a video that ever does such a spectacle justice. There's so many subtle details that get completely obliterated on video.
Here's some video that do a pretty good job of showing what they look like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWhrW7lpqZM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyW0g1SIyxI
The videos of the one in Russia are on an entirely different scale. The sonic boom was tremendous, the amount of light being thrown off of that thing was unbelievable. Extrapolating from what I saw and how I now know video changes things, this must have been an unbelievable beautiful and terrifying sight.
[+] [-] GuiA|13 years ago|reply
I wonder what must have gone through the minds of our ancestors when, hundreds or thousands of years ago, they'd witness such events (let alone ones similar to the Russian meteor). A lot of old creation myths etc. make a lot more sense now :)
[+] [-] anovikov|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damoncali|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] free652|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uvdiv|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] speeder|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jug6ernaut|13 years ago|reply
The secondary damage would be much worse then primary.
[+] [-] ars|13 years ago|reply
Meteor defense relies on early detection, but we are unable to spot these until after they already hit (and by then it's too late).
[+] [-] thesis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkfrank|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cobrausn|13 years ago|reply
http://jalopnik.com/why-russians-are-obsessed-with-dash-cams...
EDIT: Just realized this was posted as a HN news item, probably from the original source.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227182
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|13 years ago|reply
Like NASCAR stationary cameras around a track can be stitched to appear to track with the cars.
[+] [-] nollidge|13 years ago|reply
EDIT: well, lots of news agencies are using the word "exploded", so maybe it did. I see somebody else mentioned claims that Russians shot at it, but I'm skeptical that they'd be able to notice and react to this thing in time.
EDIT EDIT: OK so it looks like space rocks "airbursting" is not unheard of: [0]. Really curious what the physics of that involves.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_blast#Asteroid_airburs...
[+] [-] mapt|13 years ago|reply
In this case, the most intense period involves peak pressure. The meteor falls down, encountering gradually thicker air, heating up and heating up, until finally, the pressure and differential internal stresses are sufficient to separate it into smaller pieces.
These smaller pieces are a lot less massive per surface area, so the pressure acting on them is going to be a lot more relative to their mass, and they are going to slow down much faster. The deceleration while this is going on, then, is going to induce sufficient turbulence to break them up even faster. So the breakup occurs in a sort of chain reaction, and the pressure waves from nearby fragments influence each other, adding turbulence and slowing the cloud of fragments further, until it all ends up as small particles spread over a large area. These particles are moving for the first fraction of a second of their life at supersonic velocities, generating a very large pocket of vacuum / shockwave as they dissipate their energies. The rapid expansion of the largest highly vulnerable layer of the asteroid into a cloud of dust thus constitutes an 'explosion', even if the energy is all kinetic instead of the slow chemical burning that happens afterwards as the white-hot particles oxidise & turn to ash.
Asteroids are not uniform, however. Wrap a chunk of granite in a chunk of sandstone, and you may end up chipping off bits of the sandstone for 10s, heating up until all the white-hot sandstone flies off in fragments at once for 2s, and then the granite flying further towards the ground until its yield strength is exceeded in a higher pressure regime, or it impacts the ground. With complex structures, multiple waves of fragmentation are possible, and rather than being a simple matter of the fragments immediately dissipating into small particles and a harder core, a meteor will tend to split into chunks which themselves become smaller examples of this phenomena.
[+] [-] prawks|13 years ago|reply
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/02/15/russia-m...
[+] [-] svachalek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ananyob|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manojlds|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 31reasons|13 years ago|reply
Edit: Ah, its also in the news http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/02/asteroid-2012...
[+] [-] yeison|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cygwin98|13 years ago|reply
Anyway, here is the wiki link to that event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
When I was a kid who was fascinated by UFO stuffs, that one was always speculated to be an explosion of an Alien spaceship.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abcd_f|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chakalakasp|13 years ago|reply
Most asteroids that we can detect we do not have the technology to deflect unless we discover them decades before impact. Even then, deflecting them is all theoretical and would be a monumental technological undertaking, as it has never been attempted before.
[+] [-] paul_f|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ingaz|13 years ago|reply
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RussianGuySuffers...
Universe agrees with it: Tunguska and "УФО" are both in Russia.
I suppose that all other world can relax: something bad or REALLY BAD will go on head of "russkie"
(It was a joke)
[+] [-] Raz0rblade|13 years ago|reply
I mean recently Nasa found some anomaly on Mars too, and then they say "no its not interesting its just erosion; (mars has next to none atmospheric pressure btw) i mean if i where a geologist, then any curious shape even if it was made by erosion would attract my attention i would take samples; and most likely such samples would be more interesting then dust-hole digging. What has become from NASA i wonder. Once they where explorers curious.. now they only call their device curiosity
[+] [-] ravishk|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikhote-Alin_meteorite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patomskiy_crater (Debatable meteorite origins)
[+] [-] lutusp|13 years ago|reply
No. An incoming meteor or asteroid is perfectly ecumenical with respect to location, therefore the vast majority of meteors fall into the oceans.
On a related note, the best time to see meteors is between midnight and dawn in whatever location you find yourself. The reason? At dawn, if you look straight up, you're looking in the direction Earth is moving in its orbit at thirty kilometers per second. By contrast, if you look straight up at sunset, you're looking at where Earth has just been and is receding from at thirty kilometers per second. Earth's velocity is added to that of the wandering space rocks near dawn, but is subtracted at sunset.
The Russian meteor even happened at dawn.
[+] [-] wglb|13 years ago|reply
Or, alternatively, not.
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julieb612|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] caf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prawks|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drakeandrews|13 years ago|reply