Posted on 03/22/2013 11:05:49 PM PDT by 444Flyer
A bright meteor briefly outshined the lights of New York City Friday evening (March 22), according to reports by witnesses who used Twitter and the Internet to report sightings of the fireball streaking over a broad stretch of the U.S. East Coast.
"Strange Friday night … a meteor passed over my house tonight!" wrote one New Yorker writing as Yanksmom19.
The first fireball sightings came at about 8 p.m. EDT (0000 March 23 GMT) and sparked more than 500 witness reports to the American Meteor Society. Reports of the meteor flooded Twitter from New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.
"The witnesses range from along the Atlantic Coast ranging from Maine to North Carolina," Robert Lunsford, the society's fireball coordinator, wrote in an update. "This object was also seen as far inland as Ohio."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
In a related story a strange object was seen landing near
Grover’s Mill New Jersey.....
The Super’s gonna be pissed!
I’m relieved - I was worried about Klendathu
“The only thing that could cause an increased incident of meteors is if somehow there is more debris everywhere”
Not true. There are definitely areas of space that are more dusty than others. Right now we are passing through the galactic plan of the Milky way which is definitely more dusty.
“At 22,000+ miles out they are so far and so fast that they will never come back. “
Geosynch satellites are at the tipping point. That is inside of geosynch, satellites fall to earth, and outside, they spin off to space.
The moon is slowly going out to space.
but yes, with a tiny boost, the geo synch satellites will go out to space.
“At 22,000+ miles out they are so far and so fast that they will never come back. “
Geosynch satellites are at the tipping point. That is inside of geosynch, satellites fall to earth, and outside, they spin off to space.
The moon is slowly going out to space.
but yes, with a tiny boost, the geo synch satellites will go out to space.
If the fireball was seen from Maryland to Boston, that must have been a BIG chunk of rock.
OK, who brought the dog?
I have been suspecting that what the Earth has been seeing for a while is like an ancient collision that did the equivalent of sending a shotgun blast of objects in our general direction.
An interesting point about such collisions is that while the Moon is about 27% the size of the Earth, this does not count Earth’s atmosphere. With the atmosphere, the Earth is a substantially larger target for space objects, larger by say a 50 to 100 miles thick atmosphere.
NASA does monitor Moon impacts of objects over 1 pound.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/lunar/
Some are, but they are generally easily distinguished from meteors because meteors are so much faster than re-entering satellite debris.
You'd probably be shocked at how tiny the rock really was.
1) These things are moving at incredible speeds
2) They are incredibly high up, probably 20 times higher than they "look." When one of these disappears from view over the horizon people will absolutely insist it must have hit "just over the next hill" when in reality it never got closer than 60 miles to the ground.
Not a single poster took this seriously as a grave threat to life on this planet. Who did your lobotomy?
So what would a serious person do about it?
Oh, I'm well aware that it was likely 60-100 miles up. That's my point -- that it was emitting luminous energy visible from 100 miles away, along a track that stretched hundreds of miles. That's a lot of kinetic energy, indicating something significantly bigger than a bread basket (but most likely much smaller than the Russian meteor).
Arguably, there is no, "our way". There is however, "our vicinity." Think of a flak explosion from a single WWII anti-aircraft shell. When it would detonate in proximity to an aircraft, it would send shards of shrapnel in all directions, with just as many shards blasting directly away from the aircraft as directly towards it at the instant of detonation. Since the aircraft was in continuous motion as well, those shards that may have been projected directly at the aircraft at the moment of detonation were no longer moving directly at the aircraft the instant after, but rather at something of an oblique, so in that regard, I suppose you could technically state there was no true, "our way."
Having said that, some areas of the European sky were far more heaviily defended by flak than others, and I'm not sure you would have been able to persuade any pilots to fly into high densities of flak by explaining to them that none of the shards of shrapnel were really going to be headed "their way," or that the overwhelming majority of the shrapnel in each shell would in fact be blasting "away" from them.
Then develop a plan in the back of your mind in the event an NEO likely strike.
Which brings us to the heart of the problem with asteroid defenses: the Klendathu, they are us. The capability to deploy asteroid defenses and/or the capability t o mine asteroids also confers the capability to use asteroids to bombard and destroy most life on the Earth. This is an upcoming problem which is already becoming a topic for international disputes.
You’re probably joking but I’ve had a vague, lurking suspicion that we’ve entered a cyclical period of high frequency for this sort of thing. Some will say we’re seeing more because more people are looking, that awareness is heightened, sort of like that “summer of the shark” hysteria of a few years back. Don’t know about that.
I do know this sort of video comes in almost every week now to the point that formerly very uncommon sightings of larger meteors or “fireballs” are now not so uncommon. The Mayans appear to have been bloodthirsty pagans who practiced human sacrifice among other social niceties, so they’re easily dismissed by presumably advanced societies such as ours. But, they were very advanced in astronomy, all else aside. The “end of an age” might just build slowly for all we know.
“But, they were very advanced in astronomy, all else aside.”
And calendars and time it would seem. Perhaps a cycle that we’re just now finding out?
That’s the thing that sticks with me, the cyclical calendar.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.