Meteorite hits Russia

[PepperElf]

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/...ral-mountains/

Russia's Ural Mountains got his by a ... meteorite?

That's gotta be pretty scary. Nothing you can do to prepare for THAT.

[bhskittykatt]

That's pretty freaky...but also, it looks so coooool!

[PepperElf]

That's pretty freaky...but also, it looks so coooool!

Yeah. They had some really freaky images here. Looks like something out of Armageddon.

Pictures 6 & 8 show some of the building damage.

[TheSHAD0W]

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7ed_1360924143 - several videos of the meteor and the aftermath.

[NorthernZel]

Just wondering whether some of our retail workers in here got a visit from some doomsday preppers after the news came out? Some media reports say that Cuba also got hit by a meteorite earlier...
(BTW, the Big Asteroid that also was scheduled to have a close fly-by has already moved on. It will return in 2046, but then it'll be about half a million miles away.)

BTW, I had a "you've-gotta-be-kidding-me" moment today. I read the news about the Russian Meteorite on my phone on my way to work. When I entered the office, the radio played Aerosmith's "I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing"....

[PepperElf]

Yeah I heard about Cuba.

I doubt anyone went nuts here though - at least in my area that is. Most of the people here are already prepared for disasters anyway - it's tornado season here. The supplies for zombie invasions work pretty well for those "omg the tornado took down the power lines" situations too.

(or i hope they do at least - cos one of the farming areas here got hit pretty bad with a tornado a week or two ago. )

[Ben_Who]

I kept waiting for CNN.com to have something about it, but they were apparently desperate to turn that derelict cruise ship into a thing, because I didn't read a word about it on that website until almost 12 hours after it happened. Meanwhile, Twitter was on fire, Phil Plaitt the Bad Astronomer had already blogged about it, and the first reports of injuries were coming in - while CNN.com had all its cameras pointed at the cruise ship.

Meanwhile, some people were saying that at least it happened in Russia where the population was sparse (Chelyabinsk has 1.3 million people in it) and a video went out showing a blazing crater that was so obviously a hoax that even my amateur astronomer roommate was having a laugh.

[wolfie]

What I find the scariest part is that some meteorite impacts (not this one from the description, but the Tunguska event in the early 20th century definitely fit the bill) bear a striking resemblance to another form of rapid energy release, with one significant difference that people might not think to check until it's too late. What is this significant difference? Unlike a nuke going off, there's a complete absence of radioactivity above background levels.

I can just imagine such an incident happening in a populated area during a time of tension between superpowers, getting mistaken for a nuclear attack, and the country that was "the victim of a sneak attack" retaliating. Of course, the other country sees the "massive unprovoked attack" (missiles sent in retaliation for the "sneak attack"), and retaliates in turn.

[lordlundar]

That would be unlikely. Celestial impacts are very unique and (thankfully) very easy to distinguish from both civilian and military detection systems from a WMD.

You have to remember that this is not an uncommon occurrence. Astronomers predict an impact roughly every 5 years but most are in extremely sparsely populated areas. During the most tense periods during the cold war when even a mistimed sneeze could have started nuclear armageddon meteor impacts were still occurring and nobody pushed the red button then.

No, unless orbital Mass Drivers are a reality it's extremely unlikely that a meteor impact would be mistaken for a nuclear attack.

[TheSHAD0W]

More information about the meteor...

http://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/ht...es/Meteor5.png

Note the bottom, that this meteor was coming from a completely different direction than the asteroid; hell of a coincidence.

We also have *two* other meteor sightings which caused no damage, in SF, CA and Cuba:

http://www.mercurynews.com/twitter/c...ss&cid=dlvr.it

http://www.heavy.com/news/2013/02/me...eorite-strike/

Another factoid: The force of the blast of the meteorite exploding in midair was roughly 100 kilotons. This is comparable to the Tunguska event, though Tunguska apparently occurred at a lower altitude, causing more damage.

[Draper Mel]

Actually, meteorites of that size aren't detectable on radar until it's too late to do anything about them. Here's Neil DeGrasse Tyson on the Today show yesterday:

http://youtu.be/P1o1PNL9GeQ

He also mentions a meteorite that exploded in the atmosphere over India and Pakistan during the dispute over the Kashmir region back in the 1990s. If it hadn't been determined that it was a meteorite explosion, it could have triggered nuclear war between the two countries.

[TheSHAD0W]

http://news.yahoo.com/russian-meteor...234920189.html

Update: Meteor was roughly 55 feet across, weighing 10,000 tons, and traveling 40,000 MPH; the explosion produced was roughly 1/2 megaton.