Author Topic: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia  (Read 222883 times)

Offline sanman

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #240 on: 02/16/2013 06:32 pm »
Or you could just buy a canary - if it suddenly starts squawking, then you have 15 secs to duck and cover.

Offline R7

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #241 on: 02/16/2013 07:03 pm »
Couple weeks from now and nobody remembers Chelyabinsk. Public and media attention span is short. News are already stressing how unlikely the event was. No $500M to prevent mass window-breaking event once every one hundred years.  :-[

Would love to be wrong on this one though.
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Offline Apollo-phill

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #242 on: 02/16/2013 07:17 pm »
I was in Iceland on Monday 11 Feb 2013 watching the Northern lights - an incredible spectacle lasting over 3 hours.

While watching saw four meteors streak across night sky - at separate times - moving from north to northeast . Related to this mini asteroid?

Phill


Offline JimO

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #243 on: 02/16/2013 07:26 pm »
I'm scheduled for a hit on NBC Nightly tonight, with mitigation justifications....

Offline sanman

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #244 on: 02/16/2013 07:29 pm »
Here's a cute little interview with NASA astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, where he also talks about mitigation:



« Last Edit: 02/16/2013 07:30 pm by sanman »

Online DaveS

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #245 on: 02/16/2013 07:30 pm »
I was in Iceland on Monday 11 Feb 2013 watching the Northern lights - an incredible spectacle lasting over 3 hours.

While watching saw four meteors streak across night sky - at separate times - moving from north to northeast . Related to this mini asteroid?

Phill


Don't think so. Remember, the Earth is constantly bombarded with stuff like really small MMOD. If I remember yesterday's teleconference right, I think the number mentioned was something like 800 metric tonnes per day of space stuff.
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Offline Danderman

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #246 on: 02/16/2013 07:34 pm »
Suspected meteor explosion reported in central Cuba

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/761637.shtml

An object fell from the sky over central Cuba on Thursday night and turned into a fireball "bigger than the sun" before it exploded, a Cuban TV channel reported Friday, citing eyewitnesses.

Some residents in the central province of Cienfuegos were quoted as saying that at around 8 p.m. local time Thursday (0100 GMT Friday) they saw a bright spot in the sky comparable to a bus in size.

The object then turned into a fireball "bigger than the sun," said the witnesses, adding that several minutes later they heard a loud explosion.

One resident told the TV station that his house shook slightly in the blast.

Cuban experts have been dispatched to the area to look for possible remains of the meteor-like object, said the report.

It remains unknown whether the reported phenomenon in Cuba is related to Friday's meteor strike in central Russia, which set off a shockwave that shattered windows and left some 1,000 people injured.

Offline Ben the Space Brit

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #247 on: 02/16/2013 08:24 pm »
Couple weeks from now and nobody remembers Chelyabinsk. Public and media attention span is short. News are already stressing how unlikely the event was. No $500M to prevent mass window-breaking event once every one hundred years.  :-[

Would love to be wrong on this one though.

Heck, the media here in the UK is already folding up its tents and going home.  The story is vanishing from web front pages, is no longer mentioned on TV news and didn't make the front page of any British paper, even the "quality" press.

As cynical as this sounds, a part of me wonders if they would have taken it more seriously if it had been a mass-fatality event or would it still have been "something that happens in foreign lands that are of no interest to our readers/viewers" and quickly forgotten.
« Last Edit: 02/16/2013 08:25 pm by Ben the Space Brit »
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Offline lcs

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #248 on: 02/16/2013 08:30 pm »
Suspected meteor explosion reported in central Cuba

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/761637.shtml

An object fell from the sky over central Cuba on Thursday night and turned into a fireball "bigger than the sun" before it exploded, a Cuban TV channel reported Friday, citing eyewitnesses.
« Last Edit: 02/16/2013 08:30 pm by lcs »

Offline sanman

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #249 on: 02/16/2013 08:40 pm »
This is obviously a result of Global Warming (so says CNN anchor):



I guess that's why they call it Meteorology!   :P
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« Last Edit: 02/16/2013 08:41 pm by sanman »

Offline R7

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #250 on: 02/16/2013 08:55 pm »
This is obviously a result of Global Warming (so says CNN anchor):
I guess that's why they call it Meteorology!   :P
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Offline darkenfast

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #251 on: 02/16/2013 09:26 pm »
That sounds like a classic example of modern liberal arts education. I thought it was a joke until I actually listened to it.
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Offline Mongo62

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #252 on: 02/16/2013 09:44 pm »
Her comment about a link between global warming and asteroids was obviously a joke.

And yes, it is nearly certain that global warming had a LOT to do with Sandy.
« Last Edit: 02/16/2013 09:44 pm by Mongo62 »

Offline sdsds

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #253 on: 02/16/2013 09:46 pm »
Well-reasoned op-ed in the Washington Post by Rush Holt (D - NJ, and former assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory) and Donna F. Edwards (D - MD, and ranking Democrat on the House subcommittee on space):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-on-notice-to-plan-for-the-next-meteor/2013/02/15/c46b7c1a-77ab-11e2-aa12-e6cf1d31106b_story.html
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Offline iamlucky13

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #254 on: 02/16/2013 09:49 pm »
Before I start my long catch up post, I've read the later posts, and I agree with Blackstar - whatever intention we state or plan we make is pointless if we don't provide actual appropriations to accomplish it.

We could start by putting this in perspective. How many people have died in the past decade from seismic-related events? How much money is being spent to predict those?

No one knows of a reliable way to predict individual seismic events, just long-term probabilities.

Instead, as you know, we mitigate the effects. The US spends over $800 billion per year on construction projects (Census Bureau). If even 5% of that (I suspect it's more, but don't have a good source for) is due to the expense of meeting or upgrading to seismic standards, then that means the US alone spends over twice NASA's entire budget addressing earthquakes...

...to mitigate a hazard that has killed two people in the last decade (USGS)

But we do, of course, know of a fairly reliable way to predict asteroid impacts - by cataloging asteroids as thoroughly as possible.

Going from 95% of 1 km and 5% of 140 meter (the current survey status according to Blackstar) to 100% of 15 meter sounds like a colossal effort. Add to that some sort of deflection capability and you’re probably talking $500 billion.

The observed frequency of need is one zero-fatality air burst per century, and one extinction event per 65 million years.

Wouldn’t it be better to spend the money developing the capability to deflect hurricanes and tornadoes? Lotta people gonna think that way.

You don't need a standing deflection capability. You just need to know where they are long enough ahead of time to prepare a single response if one does turn out to be a problem. 99942 Apophos was perfectly illustrative of what we want to achieve. It was discovered in 2004, large enough to potentially cause regional devastation and immediately noted as at risk of a collision 32 years later. We now know it won't hit in 2036, but if it were to, we'd have had 3 decades to figure out what to do about it.

That does leave a short-term risk we find something too late to develop a response other than shelter or evacuate, but the alternative is not finding it until it's too late for even that. I very much agree the cost of a standing deflection capability is not merited by the extremely low short-term risk.

Even so, $500 billion is clearly just an arbitrarily large number you picked. You're implying a project the size of the space shuttle program operating for a century!

Most of the asteroids discovered so far have been found using ~1m automated telescopes - roughly the size of those used to film shuttle launches. The most prolific asteroid-hunting program so far, the Catalina Sky Survey has a budget on the order of $1 million per year, and just began a $4 million upgrade, about a decade after the last upgrade.

$1.5 million per year is peanuts. Since you mention hurricanes and tornados - roughly half of NOAA's $5 billion annual budget goes the National Weather Service and the cost maintaining and operating weather satellites.

As is often said, a hit with mass fatalities is not a matter of "if" but a matter of "when." However, the knowledge we gain from this search is nearly permanent. Once an asteroid is discovered, it only needs occasional follow-up observations to refine the long-term orbit predictions. Searching now lays the groundwork for protecting our planet for as long as civilization endures.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying we need any kind of crash program to launch a fleet of Hubble-size asteroid hunters or anything like that.

We're honestly making excellent progress as is, even though I think it's worth trying at least a little harder. What would it cost to double the size of our current ground-based telescopes, thereby quadrupling their sensitivity? I'd be shocked if it even cracked $100 million, but it would further accelerate the discovery rate of medium-to-large asteroids, and enable us to find even smaller asteroids than we otherwise would.

Meanwhile, even with the existing scopes, astronomers are finding other uses for the Catalina data, such as measuring variability in star brightness. For that matter, cataloging asteroids is in its own right scientifically informative as well as consistent with one of the often-discussed exploration roadmaps.

We can't expect to pull off any such amazing feat as cataloging 100% of the near earth asteroids 15m or larger (and even that would still leave long-period comets undetected), but it is feasible and we're well on our way to discovering all the asteroids that can destroy an entire country (1 km+), and we can credibly and reasonably locate given enough time most of the asteroids that can destroy a city or state-sized area (100m-1km).


Part of the reason they went on trial is because they told their citizens not to bother preparing for earthquakes and enjoy a glass of wine. Totally unrelated.

It was an administrator who told people to have a glass of wine. The geologists had briefed him that they had no indications that what turned out to be foreshocks were any different than previous earthquake swarms. The administrator definitely and the geologists probably merited some civil action for downplaying the risk, but a criminal charge of manslaughter is completely out of proportion with what amounted to them saying, "we don't think what's going merits people sleeping in the streets in near freezing weather and at risk of robbery and other crimes" (as the prosecution absurdly claimed those who died would have done to protect themselves if a more appropriate statement had been made like "Small earthquakes like these sometimes precede more serious earthquakes but we have no reliable way of knowing if a larger quake is imminent").

The real issue, which the entire trial exuded a vibe of deliberate distraction from, is the fact that in a city with a long history of mass casualties from earthquakes, the construction quality (even of some of the modern buildings) was poor enough for a relatively moderate M6.3 to kill hundreds of people.
« Last Edit: 02/16/2013 09:52 pm by iamlucky13 »

Offline Leo E Liptical

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #255 on: 02/16/2013 10:07 pm »
Russian news now reporting no fragments found in lake, maybe due to hole in ice formed because of different reason, not impact.

See rt.com
This is what they posted:
18:40 GMT: The search for the meteorite parts at Chebarkul Lake and at
other two locations has officially been stopped. The huge ice hole
found at the lake on Friday “has formed because of a different reason,”
the Vice-Governor of Chelyabinsk region Igor Murog told Interfax-Ural.
I like to watch... satellites

Offline iamlucky13

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #256 on: 02/16/2013 10:23 pm »
In this video (posted previously), the shock wave arrives at 1:10. After the initial startle, the camera is then pointed at a rising cloud of smoke coming from a source hidden by a building. The smoke appears new.

See also pictures labeled 01, 02, and 03 on this page showing the zinc factory. Photo 1 shows a similar cloud of smoke as the video:
http://zyalt.livejournal.com/722930.html#cutid1

Furthermore, all of the damage I've seen so far has been broken windows, and in the worst cases, a couple doors knocked off hinges. No other structural collapses from the shock wave, but in photo 03, the bricks appear to have been scattered pretty forcefully.

So I additionally am led to speculate the zinc factory was hit by a fragment, although there appears to be no word on that yet, so my only basis is disbelief that this singular building would suffer so much worse damage than everything else.

The timing would be coincidental, but not incredible - no doubt the meteor was still supersonic at the time of breakup, so the fragment would at first outpace the shockwave, then slow below supersonic, with the shockwave just happening to catch up to it again at about the same time it hit the ground.

!
« Last Edit: 02/16/2013 10:24 pm by iamlucky13 »

Offline QuantumG

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #257 on: 02/16/2013 10:32 pm »
Her comment about a link between global warming and asteroids was obviously a joke.

And yes, it is nearly certain that global warming had a LOT to do with Sandy.

The problem was that it was a rain storm.. if it had been a little colder it would have been an ice storm instead. Ice can't hurt people, because it's a crystal and crystals heal people.

Many meteorites also have crystals in them. The Russians were hurt mostly by flying glass.. which is not a crystal. It will be expensive to replace all the glass in the world with crystal but if it saves just one child's life, I think it's worth it.


« Last Edit: 02/16/2013 10:34 pm by QuantumG »
Human spaceflight is basically just LARPing now.

Offline sanman

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #258 on: 02/16/2013 10:40 pm »
I think her comment was more babble or banter than joke, and it still came across as ignorant rather than informed.

Anyway, here's an interesting site to let you sling some stones at Earth:

http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/

Offline bubbagret

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Re: Meteor Strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia
« Reply #259 on: 02/16/2013 10:47 pm »
Q.G. for the win!

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