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To: Strategerist
I posted this on another thread to another poster claiming a missile could on have hit the meteorite. Hope you enjoy it.

An ICBM travels pretty fast too, the idea is to intercept it not catch up with it. That said there is no anti missile system capable of intercepting a meteorite on short notice. By short notice I mean “Holly s**t what that in the sky?” lol, but just for grins a 20 lbs anything inpacking a meteor traveling at 60,000 mph would result in a very very big band as e=mv2 and 60k mph squared is a very big number. Lets do the math! Mass is about 9kg, velocity is about 30,000m per second so the energy is about 8.1 billion joules. That is enough energy to light up 81 million 100 watt light bulbs for 1 second. Or about 2.1 kilotons of TNT, a small nuke, Not bad for a 20lbs payload.

97 posted on 02/16/2013 7:06:59 AM PST by jpsb
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To: jpsb

Throw a ping-pong ball at a speeding cement truck?


106 posted on 02/16/2013 11:42:56 AM PST by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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