What would you cough up money for? Can these rocks be detected, let alone protected, for any amount of money that would be just a slice of the current Homeland Security budget? When it comes to a hazard vulnerability analysis, this incident does nothing to move meteor attacks up the list.
Quite a contrail, too. Must have been a lot of water and other volatiles, perhaps a small comet?
I agree with the preceding posts - this is a very damaging event, but we can and should be glad it isn't worse. So far no deaths reported. ...
Also, some seismic data.http://earthquake.usgs.gov/monitoring/operations/station.php?network=IU&station=MAKZ#heliplot
Quote from: yg1968 on 02/15/2013 08:57 pmThere is some efforts that are being made. See this link (the survey of NEAs larger than 1 km is not yet completed from what I understand): The requirement was for 90%. They are at 95%. They are for all intents and purposes complete. You can never get to 100%.There is a requirement for searching for 140 meter NEOs. That's nowhere near done (I think they're at no more than 5%). See the report I linked to earlier for more details.Frankly, NASA doesn't want to do this, and nobody really wants to do this. A few members of Congress slipped some language into bills many years ago requiring NASA to do it, but nobody provided any extra money for them to do it. That's why it's largely not getting done. Simply put, the people who run the country do not think that this is an important issue, or even a minor issue, and never have.
There is some efforts that are being made. See this link (the survey of NEAs larger than 1 km is not yet completed from what I understand):
USA Today says "a force of 20 Hiroshima bombs"http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/02/15/russia-meteorite/1921991/
Frankly, NASA doesn't want to do this, and nobody really wants to do this. A few members of Congress slipped some language into bills many years ago requiring NASA to do it, but nobody provided any extra money for them to do it. That's why it's largely not getting done. Simply put, the people who run the country do not think that this is an important issue, or even a minor issue, and never have.
I've been digging around in earthquake.usgs.gov and find that the event produced seismic signals as far away as Iowa, perhaps not surprisingly. There was also a fairly widespread signal about ten minutes before the initial one from Chelyabinsk that was detected strongly in New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii and McMurdo Sound. I suspect this was a coincidentally timed earthquake, but mention it FWIW>
I am out of my depth here, but I vaguely recall from earth science class that earthquakes generate two types of waves that travel at different speeds. S and P I think. My point being that makes sense that one wave, the P(?) would arrive before the S wave.
There's also never (during the space age) been such a pertinent, documented case of why it is important, and probably has never been such public attention to the topic, either.
-compare the costs, and the risks, to other events that kill lots of people. If you go back only one decade I bet that you can easily determine that over 800,000 people worldwide were killed by seismic events (250,000 in Haiti alone). Earthquakes represent real dangers to human life.-where should that $500+ million be spent for maximum effect? Should it be spent on things like asteroids, which are very rare, or should it be spent on things that are much more common?
-in order to substantially improve the surveys for these objects you have to spend A LOT more money. Essentially, you have to build a space-based telescope. No matter what B612 says, that's a half billion dollar investment.