Meteor in Russia

[Mac]

Meteor impact site

 

[tsteele316]

so, i assume ivan drago is just going to crawl out of the hole in that lake any second now.

 

[HineyBuck]

From the Moscow Times.

 

[Muck]

JPL/NASA

New information provided by a worldwide network of sensors has allowed scientists to refine their estimates for the size of the object that entered that atmosphere and disintegrated in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia, at 7:20:26 p.m. PST, or 10:20:26 p.m. EST on Feb. 14 (3:20:26 UTC on Feb. 15).

The estimated size of the object, prior to entering Earth's atmosphere, has been revised upward from 49 feet (15 meters) to 55 feet (17 meters), and its estimated mass has increased from 7,000 to 10,000 tons. Also, the estimate for energy released during the event has increased by 30 kilotons to nearly 500 kilotons of energy released. These new estimates were generated using new data that had been collected by five additional infrasound stations located around the world - the first recording of the event being in Alaska, over 6,500 kilometers away from Chelyabinsk. The infrasound data indicates that the event, from atmospheric entry to the meteor's airborne disintegration took 32.5 seconds. The calculations using the infrasound data were performed by Peter Brown at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average," said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones."

The trajectory of the Russia meteor was significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, which hours later made its flyby of Earth, making it a completely unrelated object. The Russia meteor is the largest reported since 1908, when a meteor hit Tunguska, Siberia.

"An image from the SEVIRI instrument aboard our Meteosat-10 geostationary satellite. The vapour trail left by the meteor that was seen near Chelyabinsk in Russia on 15th February 2013 is visible in the centre of the image."

This gif is especially cool because you can actually see the meteorite breaking up/exploding (the multiple bright flashes).

Odd thing, when I first saw this on the news this morning (not paying close attention), I was thinking, "Are they sure that was a meteor?" - and this is all kind of second hand info, but, there are in Chelyabinsk, or near there, a lot of very deep Ural mountain lakes, and in these lakes they did a lot of the testing for Soviet submarine missiles, according to a friend of mine, whose father, well, was part of that program, and even into the 90's and 2000's they were still developing those rockets there (and maybe still are, I have no idea) to lauch sattelites as a (potentially) low cost alterntative to land based missile for countries like Brazil, etc. So, my mind went immediately to "whoops!"

The Kura Test Range is all the way over on Kamchatka. The last documented impact there was last summer...
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaLvTZqXNmU"]????? ?????????? ??? ??? ????????? | Flight of warheads on Kura - YouTube[/ame]

 

[Muck]

Another meteorite in Cuba, witnesses: "big explosion and noise"

Another meteorite, another outbreak accompanied by objects falling from the sky was reported by residents of a town in the central region of Cuba.

"The explosion shook the houses in the place," reported witnesses to the local TV stations. In a report released by Rodas, in the province of Cienfuegos some residents have described a very bright light that has come to have large size, comparable to that of a bus, before exploding in the sky.

Marcos Rodriguez, an expert in the area, claimed that it was a "fireball", a piece of stone and metal, which entered the Earth's atmosphere at high speed. Cuban specialists are examining the area for possible remains Rodas minerals falling from the sky, the TV station added.

Another Meteor Flashes Across (San Francisco) Bay Area Skies

On the heels of a close fly-by of an asteroid 17,000 miles from Earth on Friday morning and a devastating meteor that landed in Russia, Bay Area stargazers caught a glimpse of another meteor Friday night. Social media users reported seeing the blue flash of the meteor around 8 p.m. Friday, and sightings were reported throughout the Bay Area, from Santa Clara to Fairfield, and even in the Central Valley cities of Fresno and Stockton.

Gerald McKeegan, an astronomer with the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, was at the center Friday night for its weekend stargazing sessions with free access to the center's large telescopes, but he said they did not spot the meteor there.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLpTOc1i8_8"]Shooting Star across San Francisco 2/15/2013 7:44PM - YouTube[/ame]


Well it's been nice knowing you all. Good luck!

It's 11:59 on Radio Free America; this is Uncle Sam, with music, and the truth until dawn. Right now I've got a few words for some of our brothers and sisters in the occupied zone: "the chair is against the wall, the chair is against the wall", "john has a long mustache, john has a long mustache". It's twelve o'clock, American, another day closer to victory. And for all of you out there, on, or behind the line, this is your song.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az5DBgVzdxc"]Battle Hymn of the Republic - YouTube[/ame]

 

[Muck]

A handy tool to help plot the optimal size of meteor to destroy Ann Arbor (the whore).

 

[Muck]

Can't believe I missed this last month...

Apophis Risk Assessment Updated

Steve Chesley, Davide Farnocchia
NASA/JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office
February 21, 2013

A recent study has updated the impact hazard assessment for 99942 Apophis, a 325-meter diameter near-Earth asteroid that has been the focus of considerable attention after it was found in December 2004 to have a significant probability of Earth impact in April 2029. While the 2029 potential impact was ruled out within days through the measurement of archival telescope images, the possibility of a potential impact in the years after 2029 continues to prove difficult to rule out.

Based on extensive optical and radar position measurements from 2004-2012, Apophis will pass the Earth in 2029 at an altitude of 31900 +/- 750 km (about 5 +/- 0.1 Earth-radii above the surface of the Earth). That altitude is close enough that the Earth's gravity could deflect the asteroid onto a trajectory that brings it back to an Earth impact. Such impact trajectories require Apophis to pass the Earth at a precise altitude, known as a keyhole, in 2029 en route to a subsequent impact.

Recent observations from Pan-STARRS PS1 telescope at Haleakala, Hawaii have reduced the current orbital uncertainty by a factor of 5, and radar observations in early 2013 from Goldstone and Arecibo will further improve the knowledge of Apophis' current position. However, the current knowledge is now precise enough that the uncertainty in predicting the position in 2029 is completely dominated by the so-called Yarkovsky effect, a subtle nongravitational perturbation due to thermal re-radiation of solar energy absorbed by the asteroid. The Yarkovsky effect depends on the asteroid's size, mass, thermal properties, and critically on the orientation of the asteroid's spin axis, which is currently unknown. This means that predictions for the 2029 Earth encounter will not improve significantly until these physical and spin characteristics are better determined.

The new report, which does not make use of the 2013 radar measurements, identifies over a dozen keyholes that fall within the range of possible 2029 encounter distances. Notably, the potential impact in 2036 that had previously held the highest probability has been effectively ruled out since its probability has fallen to well below one chance in one million. Indeed only one of the potential impacts has a probability of impact greater than 1-in-a-million; there is a 2-meter wide keyhole that leads to an impact in 2068, with impact odds of about 2.3 in a million

The full report is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.1607

...and FWIW regarding the original topic:

Is this some debris from the 50 kilometer meteor that was supposed to miss us by 15 minutes?

Green line is the asteroid that passed by Earth, red line is the meteorite that impacted in Russia.

 

[AKAK]

The Kura Test Range is all the way over on Kamchatka. The last documented impact there was last summer...

Well, they got to shoot them from somewhere don't they? hence the "whoops" (and really, I have no idea what they do there now, I was just mentioning that memory popped into my head)

 

[Muck]

Well, they got to shoot them from somewhere don't they? hence the "whoops" (and really, I have no idea what they do there now, I was just mentioning that memory popped into my head)

Most of their test launches come from Plesetsk (Strategic Rocket Forces) or Nenoksa (Navy), both of which are in the NW corner of Russia while Kasputin Yar is in the SW. The meteor was traveling mostly E to W when it impacted which would rule out a launch from any of the above. There's a possibility that something launched from Baikonur or (even less likely) Sary Shagan could have transited nearby, but they are a bit far to the south for the trajectory.

 

[AKAK]

Most of their test launches come from Plesetsk (Strategic Rocket Forces) or Nenoksa (Navy), both of which are in the NW corner of Russia while Kasputin Yar is in the SW. The meteor was traveling mostly E to W when it impacted which would rule out a launch from any of the above. There's a possibility that something launched from Baikonur or (even less likely) Sary Shagan could have transited nearby, but they are a bit far to the south for the trajectory.

I have no problem with that... you know, because it was actually a meteor... not a rocket.