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Posted on 06/13/2004 3:24:49 PM PDT by ckilmer
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Is the pope catholic?
LOL! Good catch. It's have to be a large mass of especially fluffy pumice or something- a meteorite with essentially the same mass and density as a big ball of dryer lint. A bunch of us could run out and catch it with a king-size bedsheet stretched between us.
No it was June 30, 1908.
I'm think that it should have read kilometeres per second, but Pravda is such a crappy news source that I can't be certain of that.
Dang & I thought you might have something I could use the next time I hear a report about the sky falling. Still, if you could send me the address to the Acme Umbrella Company, it would be very much appreciated.
But if it did, it would be reported by the NYT as "Neighborhood flattened by meteorite -- women and minorities hit hardest."
 
A suspected meteorite crashed in a ball of fire in Sri Lanka, burning down trees and scattering particles over a celebrated giant rock, officials and scientists said. Residents of Dimbulagala, 220km north of Colombo, reported "a strange light which they had seen descending from the sky" three weeks ago, said Parakrama Beligammana, the chief state administrative officer in the region. He travelled on Sunday to the city, where he said trees had been burnt down and particles from what seemed to be a meteorite were scattered over half a hectare. The pieces fell on a famous 4km rock that is home to an ancient Buddhist temple. The particles "were quite heavy because of its high density and were bluish-black in colour", Beligammana said. Chandana Jayaratne, a senior physics lecturer at Colombo University, said he was looking at the particles and that if they are confirmed to be from a meteorite they will be sent for verification to the US space agency NASA. "They look like particles from a meteorite but until the tests are done nothing can be said," Jayaratne told AFP. Beligammana said it was unlikely the trees were burnt by bushfire because they were on the centre of the rock where fires are difficult to spread. Dimbulagala, home to 73,000 people of the majority Sinhalese community, has over the years come under heavy attack by Tamil Tiger rebels. But the government and the guerrillas have been observing a truce since February 23 and yesterday opened historic peace talks in Thailand. All rights reserved. © 2002 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse. Related LinksSpaceDaily Search SpaceDaily Subscribe To SpaceDaily Express |
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Shortly thereafter, many people in the suburban town of Park Forest awoke to the sound of rocks clattering down on their neighborhoods. Paul Sipiera (William Rainey Harper College) and James Schwade (Planetary Studies Foundation) have been mapping the extent of the meteorite fall. "At least six houses and three cars in the town of Park Forest and surrounding area were damaged," Sipiera says. He estimates that the debris fell in an elliptical-shaped strewnfield approximately 10 kilometers long and several wide.
Residents have found meteorites on roads, on lawns, and in woods. One 3-kilogram chunk crashed through a resident's roof and kitchen floor, bounced off the basement floor, and landed on a table. A slighly smaller fragment fell through a roof, hit a window and shredded its venetian blind, bounced off the windowsill, and finally destroyed a large mirror — narrowly missing a sleeping teenager.
The original body may have been nearly as big as a car before it broke apart in the upper atmosphere. Steve Simon, a meteorite specialist at the University of Chicago, says it was a relatively common type of ordinary (rocky) chondrite classified as L5. Some of the fragments consist of ancient impact melt, suggesting that the incoming object may have originated near the surface of its parent asteroid.
Ultralow-frequency sound measurements made 1,100 km away in Manitoba indicate that the fireball released the kinetic-energy equivalent of 0.5 to 1 kiloton of TNT, much more than conventional explosives but much less than most atomic bombs. If the meteoroid arrived with a velocity typical of objects from the asteroid belt, then it probably weighed 10 to 25 tons and was about 2 meters in diameter. Meteoroids this size hit Earth about a half dozen times per year but rarely over thickly settled areas. Park Forest (the event's provisional name) is the largest meteorite fall in the United States in the last five years and the first to drop hundreds of fragments over a major urban area.
Analysts have collected several videos recording the bolide's motion. If additional videos from other viewing angles can be found, it should be possible to determine an accurate orbit for the wayward object before it encountered Earth. Therefore, anyone with such videos or other accurate positional data should contact me. Success would make Park Forest only the eighth meteorite with an accurate, instrumentally determined orbit.
it probably weighed 10 to 25 tons and was about 2 meters
That would indicate an Iron type would it not?
Pretty dense.
Nor am I certain of any of it. Pravda is about as credible as the average supermarket tabloid in the US.
Meteorite crashes through roof of Auckland house
13.06.2004
9.30am
A black lump that crashed into an Auckland family's living room yesterday was identified as only the ninth meteorite to be found in this country, television's One News reported.
The 1.3kg, four billion-year-old rock fell through the roof of the house in the suburb of Ellerslie about 9am.
"There was just a huge explosion and we looked around and there was just dust everywhere," householder Brenda Archer told the station.
"I don't know what to make of it, it's unbelievable. I'm just glad no one was sitting on the couch because they just would have got absolutely crowned."
Specialists were convinced the rock was a meteorite, but would not know where it had come from until it was fully examined, One News said.
Overseas dealers were expected to offer the Archers cash for the rock.
"Falling through a roof is really an exceptional event that rarely happens, and this is a beautiful large specimen," Joel Schiff of Auckland University said.
- NZPA
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3572212&thesection=news&thesubsection=general
 WORLDWIDE RARITY: Brenda Archer and the meteorite. |
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The hit is a billions-to-one event which adds thousands to the value of the grapefruit-sized rock which plummeted through the tiled roof of Phil and Brenda Archer's Ellerslie home at 9.30am.
Collectors are also expected to begin combing the suburb for other pieces which may have survived the molten descent.
It is only the ninth meteorite ever found here and the first to hit a home. The last one was found in 1976 but it is not known when it landed. Worldwide, such strikes happen only once every three or four years.
"I was in the kitchen doing breakfast and there was this almighty explosion," said Brenda Archer. "It was like a bomb had gone off. I couldn't see anything, there was just dust. I thought something had exploded in the ceiling. Phil saw a stone under the computer and it was hot to touch."
The rock hit her leather couch and bounced back up to the ceiling before rolling under the computer. The Archers' one-year-old grandson Luca was playing nearby just minutes before the impact. "He must have a guardian angel," she said.
Experts have told the Archers to keep the rock in the oven at 100C to dry it out. They plan to take it to Auckland University tomorrow.
Their insurance company will pay for the hole in the roof and couch and two holes in the ceiling.
"Normally you would feel pretty amazed if it happened on your continent," said the chairman of the board of directors of the Auckland Observatory, Dr Grant Christie. "For it to happen in Ellerslie - just a few kilometres from the observatory - beggars belief. The folks who live in the house have headed off to buy a Lotto ticket, which is very sensible."
He had been told collectors would also bid for the couch, the ceiling, and even pieces of the Pink Batts it came through. "They could even sweep up the debris, put it in a bag and sell it."
Meteorite Magazine editor and Auckland University maths lecturer Dr Joel Schiff said the rock could be worth more than $10,000 - coming through the roof added significantly to its value.
The meteorite itself, a chunk of an asteroid, could have been basketball-sized when it impacted Earth's atmosphere at 15km a second. By the time it hit the house, its velocity had probably slowed to 100-200m a second.
"This is a national treasure. It should stay in the country but what could be offered by people here is not going to compare with what could be offered by people overseas," said Schiff. He urged museums to pool resources to buy it.
Brenda Archer said if the rock was very valuable, she would sell it, otherwise it would be donated to a museum.
The meteorites found before were discovered years after landing - one was being used as a doorstop in a farmhouse in the '50s.
Yesterday's 7 x 13cm meteorite is a chondrite type, meaning it was chipped off an asteroid, rather than a piece of moon or Mars rock, said Schiff
HOUSTON – Johnson Space Center (JSC) scientists are studying a pristine meteorite found in Canada’s Yukon Territory in January that may offer insights into the creation of the universe.
A dramatic fireball from a meteor lit up the early morning skies in northwestern Canada on Jan. 18. NASA in cooperation with Canadian authorities launched an ER 2 (U2) aircraft to capture dust samples from the upper atmosphere.
| The identity of the finder of the Yukon meteorite remains a closely-guarded secret, as does the location where he or she picked up a chunk of the now-famous space rock. Seems that even high cash offers also can't unlock Canada's tight export-control law that covers meteorites. Want to Learn More? |
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Scientists were content with what they might find from the aircraft samples since meteorites producing a fireball usually burn up in the atmosphere.
About one week later, a resident of a rugged and sparsely populated area of British Columbia notified authorities he had found particles currently dubbed by the scientific community as the "Yukon Meteorite."
"It was a textbook case of how it should be done," said Dr. Richard Herd of the Canadian geological survey. "And we had a local person who was aware and collected the samples correctly."
Early estimates say the meteorite was the size of a school bus and weighed roughly 49 tons (50 metric tons) before breaking up in the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of more than 60,000 miles per hour (96,000 kilometers per hour).
In addition to the fireball, witnesses in Alaska, the Yukon Territory and British Columbia reported at least two explosions and a contrail that hovered in the upper atmosphere for more than an hour.
Herd declined to name the person or the exact area where the particles were found, but said the finder is interested in scientific analysis done of the pristine meteorite samples.
The Canadian government is seeking permission from the finder, who also owns the meteorite, under Canadian law, for permission to cut into the meteorite particles to study them.
"He just happened to be in the right place at the right time," Herd said. "It must have been fairly obvious – dark rock against a light surface."
What makes this meteorite special is the speed in which it was discovered and how it was handled after that. The finder placed the rocks in double plastic bags and froze them.
Dr. Monica Grady of the Natural History Museum in London said keeping the samples frozen preserves volatile organic compounds that may be inside the meteorites. As the samples warm, any ice in the rock will melt and possibly wash away any organic material inside.
"Every other meteorite we’ve had in our lab has had considerable alteration -- either during fall, during recovery effort, during transmittal back to the lab, " said Dr. Michael Zolensky, a cosmic mineralogist at the Earth Science and Solar System Exploration Division at JSC. "These are the most pristine extraterrestrial materials I’ve ever had in the lab to study."
He said the about one dozen samples at the space center are carbonaceous chondrites – primitive forms with stardust and interstellar dust predating the solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago.
These types of meteorites are also rich in organic material. The lab has about five pounds of samples ranging from charcoal briquette to fingernail size along with dust samples collected by the ER 2.
"These kind of meteorites are extremely rare," Zolensky, said. "The last time any meteorites like this were seen to fall and recovered was in 1969."
Herd said the meteorite was sent to JSC because of the gamma ray spectography facilities, which are unavailable in Canada.
Zolensky said the samples may answer some questions that seem simple, but aren’t.
"It should contain water," he said. "That will tell us more about the early history of water in the solar system and how it’s moved around. For example, we don’t know how it got here (Earth) or when."
For Zolensky, the samples are a once in a lifetime or once in a career opportunity.
However, the post did not use the word square in any context and I'm still unaware of the extent of the damage.
However, the post did not use the word square in any context and I'm still unaware of the extent of the damage.
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judging by the pictures and the reports meteorite/comet/asteroid fell in an unpopulated area. no damage except to trees. the reports aren't sufficiently precise about the shape and size of the damage either.
Interesting, they say to freeze them and the Aussies said to put them in the oven.
Oh right, different hemispheres!
I know what kind of people are up at 2:00 a.m. in my home town.
Of course here, unlike in Siberia, we have electricity 24 hours a day.
Remember, the meteors spin counter-clockwise in Australia.
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