Posted on 10/05/2002 12:02:00 PM PDT by blam
Asteroid 'hit northern Russia'
A large meteorite is thought to have smashed into a forest in a remote area of Russia.
Residents in the town of Bodaibo, in the Irkutsk region of Siberia, saw a large luminous body fall from the sky.
They say the impact caused the ground to shake and made a sound like thunder.
Flashes of bright light could be seen above the impact site, which was a long way from any settlements according to the Russian newspaper Pravda.
"Locals felt a strong shock, which could be comparable to an earthquake," said the report. "In addition to that, the people also heard a thunder-like sound."
Asteroid expert Dr Benny Peiser, from Liverpool John Moore's University, said: "If the eyewitness accounts are confirmed, this fact of an earth tremor together with thunder-like explosive sounds would indicate a rather significant impact event."
He said the incident occurred on the same day as the US House of Representatives debated the need to search for smaller asteroids and the danger of mistaking impacts for nuclear attacks.
At least 30 times a year, asteroids smash into the Earth's atmosphere and explode with the force of a nuclear bomb.
These smaller asteroids, between 200 and 500 metres wide, could potentially demolish a city with a direct hit or cause tsunamis - giant waves - capable of wiping out entire coastal areas if they land in the ocean.
Astronomers estimate there could be between 900 and 1,300 large asteroids measuring one kilometre or more in our part of the solar system, while the number of smaller bodies could amount to 50,000.
Story filed: 18:25 Friday 4th October 2002
Must be something like this:
If the object stays in space it is an asteroid or comet. If it hits the atmosphere it is a meteor. If it hits the ground it is a meteorite.
Yes, it's name is Gabriel.
I knew you'd show up and sort out this mess. I don't think this is the one we've been expecting. (...any day now?)
Are there any astronomers in our ranks? This stat seems very high. I would think that if 30 astronds hit with this sort of impact each year that a city would have disappeared by now.
Most of them apparently detonate high in the atmosphere which would also indicate that they're either high in water content (relatively speaking) or are rocky ice masses.
The math for the numbers is pretty odd too. If they estimate a total of 50,000 with 30 a year hitting then they'd be exhausted in 1666 years unless they're replenished by something perturbing them out of the Oort cloud or there's a hell of a lot more of them in the inner solar system...
A meteoriod becomes a meteor when it enters Earth's atmosphere. Once it impacts, it is called a meteorite.
Here is a great image of Eros the asteroid, which is about 21 miles by 8 miles by 8 miles.
NEAR's multispectral imaging camera captured this sequence from a distance of 4620 miles (7700 km). The images of Eros were acquired every 15 degrees of rotation for one Eros "day", which is 5.27 hours long. Eros's overall shape has been compared to a boat, a shoe, a peanut, and a banana with a bite taken out of it. This sequence of images is the first to show the major geographic features of the northern and equatorial latitudes of Eros.
One of the most recent close calls occurred on March 23, 1989, when an asteroid 0.25 mile (0.4 kilometer) wide came within 400,000 miles (640,000 kilometers) of Earth. Surprised scientists estimated that Earth and the asteroid - weighing 50 million tons and traveling at 46,000 mph (74,000 kilometers per hour) -had passed the same point in space just six hours apart!
It is called Cruithne (pronounced crew-EEN-ya). It is about 3 miles across.
It also has a highly irregular orbit around the Earth defined mathimatically as a Lagrange orbit. It takes 770 years to complete the horseshoe shaped orbit around Earth.
The 1 Gajillion Muslims I saw clamoring over each other to kiss each other's spit on that rock could have fooled me.
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