Russian meteor largest in a century

http://www.nature.com/news/russian-meteor-largest-in-a-century-1.12438

by ananyob • 13 years ago

242 158 13 years ago

ceejayoz6• 13 years ago

Well, that we've noticed, at least.

ChuckMcM3• 13 years ago

That is an interesting point, If this had travelled over one of the poles would we have noticed? I tend to think that someone would have seen it, but we wouldn't have a dozen dash cam videos of it.

uvdiv5• 13 years ago

The infrasound detectors mentioned in the article can supposedly detect a 1-kiloton blast anywhere on earth [1] (page 15). This meteor was "hundreds of kilotons".

http://www.ctbto.org/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/ISS_Publicati...

manojlds• 13 years ago

Did you read the article? That's what it says - A meteor that exploded over Russia this morning was the largest recorded object to strike the Earth

ceejayoz6• 13 years ago

Actually, @uvdiv's reply to my comment reveals we're able to detect things of this size regardless of human observers being present.

ChuckMcM3• 13 years ago

Nice coverage. I especially like the infrasound analysis. The estimate of 100kT explosion suggests this thing was an order of magnitude scarier in person than it was on video, and it was pretty damn scary on video.

free652• 13 years ago

I believe the explosion was much higher in altitude somewhere between 6 to 30 miles, so video only captured the fragments of the asteroid.

damoncali2• 13 years ago

So Fat Man and Little Boy were approx 15-20 kT. Is that apples to apples? If so, holy crap.

DanBC• 13 years ago

Ground Zero allows you to pick a place and a bomb and nuke an area.

Unfortunately it hops from 21 kT to 400 kT, but still.

(http://www.carloslabs.com/projects/200712B/GroundZero.html)

johngalt2• 13 years ago

Measuring the total energy release of a meteor vs a nuclear weapon yield is not an apples to apples comparison. Not when measuring destructive force.

ChuckMcM3• 13 years ago

Yes, its the same scale, but explosions in atmosphere distribute their energy over the surface of a sphere. Surface goes up with the square of the radius (hence the inverse square law in so many things). Here being far enough away helps, the over-pressure broke non-tempered glass of the buildings closest but not the tempered glass of the vehicles.

I've watched three shuttle re-entries (benefit of being in California when they were landing in Florida) when the shuttle entered a dense enough atmosphere to create a contrail it looked very similar to this one (although it had a glowing purple leading edge which I never did get a satisfactory explanation for).

I've tried to imagine what this sort of event would look like to someone driving, now I know. Personally I would be expecting the shock wave so I would try to find some place to pull off an avoid being directly impacted by it. I did some experiments with hydrogen and oxygen in a misspent youth (its a pretty powerful explosive at the correct mixture) and the shock wave can take your breath away.

Florin_Andrei3• 13 years ago

Rocks from space release their energy a bit more gradually, and higher.

Nukes go pop all at once, closer to ground (but depends on the nuke, I guess).

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

Yes, however both of those bombs were specifically targeted, and were detonated at 2000' (Hiroshima) and 1500' (Nagasaki) above ground level, vs. 20-30 miles (105,000' - 158,000') above ground for the Chelyabinsk meteor.

Blast effects trail off markedly with distance. For Hiroshima, most blast damage was confined to a radius of 1.6 km from ground zero, roughly correlating to an overpressure of 5 psi. Glass will fragment at much lower pressures, generally 0.14 - 1.4 psi. Blast damage falls as the inverse cube of distance.

The difference between mother nature and a human adversary is that Mom has zero fucks to give for where she does her work. Asteroid impacts are randomly distributed around the planet, for the most part (latitude may play some role). Most impacts should occur over oceans. Russia, being the largest country, and Siberia, being the largest region of Russia, will tend to see more impacts than other areas, though on an area-normalized basis the maths should work out. So while we may see larger energy releases from space impacts, they'll typically be targeted away from populated regions. Not that a large enough impact couldn't still make for a really bad day.

olh• 13 years ago

Disregarding the 1000 tons meteor that blasted in the Amazon in 1930: http://star.arm.ac.uk/impact-hazard/Brazil.html

uvdiv5• 13 years ago

This one was 7,000 tonnes (mass).

ananyob• 13 years ago

NASA's just confirmed this story on their twitter feed. >>>@NASA #RussianMeteor is largest reported meteor since Tunguska event. Impact was at 3:20:26 UTC. Still being measured. More info to come.

pkfrank• 13 years ago

It's pretty fortuitous that so many folks in Russia have dashboard cams. I've got to think this is a meteor impact that has the most independent, distributed points of view that were dutifully recorded.

cobrausn• 13 years ago

Fortuitous for this, yes, but the reason why is somewhat unfortunate for Russia.

http://jalopnik.com/why-russians-are-obsessed-with-dash-cams...

EDIT: Just realized this was posted as a HN news item, probably from the original source.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227182

JoeAltmaier4• 13 years ago

I'd love to see all those dashcam videos stitched together to make a tracking movie of the meteors whole route.

Like NASCAR stationary cameras around a track can be stitched to appear to track with the cars.

prawks3• 13 years ago

They keep saying explosion, I was under the impression that the sound was the sonic boom?

drakeandrews3• 13 years ago

Russian state TV claims that the meteor was intercepted by an anti-ballistic missile system, which (if true) means the meteor was struck by a 10kt nuclear warhead.

nollidge2• 13 years ago

Source?

cygwin982• 13 years ago

Thought I needed to mention the Tunguska event in 1908. It turned out it was already mentioned in the Nature article.

Anyway, here is the wiki link to that event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

When I was a kid who was fascinated by UFO stuffs, that one was always speculated to be an explosion of an Alien spaceship.

JoeAltmaier4• 13 years ago

Or Tesla's weird experiments! There's speculation he somehow anticipated the event anyway.

cygwin982• 13 years ago

Thanks for the tip. Didn't know that. Tesla was very likely an alien or time-traveler anyway.

speeder• 13 years ago

Now.we.know why we need meteor defense. If this rock ( that is.actually small ) ended hitting a 10 millions people city filled with glassy skyscrapers, what would happen? How many people.dead or in hospitals?

jug6ernaut4• 13 years ago

Not to mention the infrastructure damage(not that i am belittling human damage). It would take years and billions of dollars to repair. Imagine every window in New York blowing out?

The secondary damage would be much worse then primary.

erickhill• 13 years ago

> Imagine every window in New York blowing out?

Something like this actually happened in Ft. Worth back in 2000. It was caused by a tornado. Walking along the sidewalks afterwards was terrifying, as you never knew if a shard of glass might come swooshing down towards your head. They did, however, create several wooden structures like painter's scaffolding that you could walk under for protection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Fort_Worth_tornado

It caused half a billion dollars in damage.

But you really couldn't have prevented it. Minimized damage, debatable.

etcet• 13 years ago

If this happened during the winter I imagine many would die of exposure.

aw3c2• 13 years ago

Thousands of people could get employment. Money would flow. It would be good for the economy.

erikpukinskis• 13 years ago

No, meteor defense can get in line behind heart disease, automobiles, suicide, gun violence, war, police, and all the other things astronomically (heh) more likely to kill people, therefore more deserving of our attention.

jug6ernaut4• 13 years ago

Always love how people throw out "gun violence" as if "gun violence"(as if there is such a thing) is so distinguishable that it should be focused on above "violence".

roc• 13 years ago

Only if we assume that our mitigation efforts against those other problems would be lacking for resources, if we sent some resources to work on space object detection/defense.

If we're putting as much money and effort into automobile safety as society wants/will allow, there's no 'loss' in taking additional funds to tackle the next problem down the line. And so on.

wheels2• 13 years ago

Heart disease and car crashes don't have the ability to derail significant economies in short shrift. There's pretty obviously a huge difference between singular, concentrated disasters and amortized "normal" human death.

JoeAltmaier4• 13 years ago

There is no line. There's just fad and fashion. What's the disease-of-the-year? Pour money into that! Never mind obesity etc. Or meteors.

wdr1• 13 years ago

Meteors have wiped out 90+% of the planet's life on several occasions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_ex... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_extinction_eve... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_bo...

blhack• 13 years ago

You should just add the word "bad" to that list.

We can't work on anything until we eradicate bad! $foo is so much less important than bad!

rmc• 13 years ago

Although those things do kill more people every year, and they are predictable numbers. We have figured out how to get along. However a meteor is currently unpredictable, and we have no plan for what happens if it hits somewhere big. The effect of all the heart attacks next year have been taken into consideration, a meter or strike to London, less so.

dj2stein9• 13 years ago

Except none of those things can realistically kill every person on the planet. Nuclear war would maybe be the only threat I think has a higher likelihood of making mankind extinct than a meteor, which is why graphics like this scare the crap out of me:

http://visually.visually.netdna-cdn.com/NuclearWeapons_4fa46...

ars• 13 years ago

How would you defend against it? I don't think we have anything that could do that.

Meteor defense relies on early detection, but we are unable to spot these until after they already hit (and by then it's too late).

cryptoz3• 13 years ago

We defend against it by improving early detection. If you detect early enough, deflection is very easy.

kamjam2• 13 years ago

We make sure there is enough money in the defence budget to send out Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and gang on more training missions. Although I'm not opposed to just leaving Ben Affleck out there for a while.

We also need to come up with some treatment for space dementia. It almost ruined the mission last time.

thesis2• 13 years ago

Wouldn't the real problem with this be special interests? The country who develops it will not want to give it up to the rest of the world for obvious reasons.

rbanffy• 13 years ago

I don't think meteors are common enough to make their early detection and destruction a valuable military asset.

whileonebegin• 13 years ago

Isn't it quite a coincidence that the largest meteor impact since 1908 occurs just hours before the closest fly-by of a large asteroid in 100 years? Yet, NASA claims these two are unrelated.

ctdonath• 13 years ago

Word is they were going in different directions.

rwhitman• 13 years ago

Yea I find this curious as well, what are the odds of that happening? How many other chunks of rock could be heading our way right now that are too small to be spotted?

jacquesm6• 13 years ago

> Yea I find this curious as well, what are the odds of that happening?

About '1' apparently.

smith234• 13 years ago

Looks like we need something better to detect such kinds of occurances

joshuahedlund• 13 years ago

I'm very intrigued by this too. The consensus though seems to be that they came from completely different directions... here's a diagram that's making the rounds in Reddit[1]. It looks like this meteor landed in Russia hours before 2012DA14 even came close to being inside the moon's orbit, which makes it hard to imagine how one could have affected the other.

[1] http://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/html/Years/2013/February/i...

paul_f2• 13 years ago

Simple really. The rock that landed in Russia was the one our alien protectors used to deflect DA14 from hitting the earth.

svachalek3• 13 years ago

They are going in nearly opposite directions and are roughly a million miles apart from each other. Once you get a real idea of how empty space is (all of the not-to-scale diagrams you get in high school are no help here) it's harder to see how they could be related than not related.

True random distributions just work that way. If something that's supposed to happen once in a hundred years is spaced out at roughly 100-year intervals, that's not random.

martinced• 13 years ago

I don't know but I do really hope that the one that hit Russia wasn't part of a smaller but faster one that did actually hit 2014-DA and change its course.

Otherwise the northern emisphere is in trouble.

I find that coincidence very, very weird too.

And you gotta love all the people saying: "Nothing to see here, move along", as if they had themselves ran all the computation and knew for sure there was no relation between the two events.

Florin_Andrei3• 13 years ago

Relax, it's unrelated.

http://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/html/Years/2013/February/i...

Coincidences do happen once in a while.

abcd_f• 13 years ago

Can anyone comment on why we don't have a handful satellites sprinkled with cameras pointing at all directions orbiting the Earth and feeding data down for analysis? Perhaps it's not much, but something is better than nothing. The excuse that this meteor wasn't spotted because it came from the sun side is laughable.

paul_f2• 13 years ago

Sounds like a wonderful Kickstarter project. Seriously though, the cost/benefit ratio isn't worth it for detecting stuff this small. "Worst in 100 years" and there was virtually no damage.

svachalek3• 13 years ago

True. There are programs actively looking for larger objects though, that you can donate to if you're interested. This is the one that found 2012 DA14 which will be passing us shortly:

http://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/neo-grants/

chakalakasp5• 13 years ago

There are a lot of asteroids in the Solar System. Millions. The solar system is huge. It's not laughable that this one wasn't seen - it was extremely tiny.

Most asteroids that we can detect we do not have the technology to deflect unless we discover them decades before impact. Even then, deflecting them is all theoretical and would be a monumental technological undertaking, as it has never been attempted before.

nollidge2• 13 years ago

They keep saying "explosion" but was there actually one? There was a sonic boom, and the rock disintegrated in the atmosphere, but I've not seen any evidence that it exploded all at once.

EDIT: well, lots of news agencies are using the word "exploded", so maybe it did. I see somebody else mentioned claims that Russians shot at it, but I'm skeptical that they'd be able to notice and react to this thing in time.

EDIT EDIT: OK so it looks like space rocks "airbursting" is not unheard of: [0]. Really curious what the physics of that involves.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_blast#Asteroid_airburs...

svachalek3• 13 years ago

EDIT: Just saw Bill Nye explain this on the DA14 webcast from planetary.org. When the meteor hits the atmosphere at such a high velocity, it's like hitting a brick wall and it explodes on impact. Then the shock wave propagates to the ground as the fragments fall and oxidize.

alanfalcon2• 13 years ago

I think Randall Munroe did a decent job explaining the physics of things dropping from space here: http://what-if.xkcd.com/28/

pyre2• 13 years ago

IIRC, the meteor can also explode due to the core heating up from the atmospheric friction, though this depends on the make-up (materials, density, configuration) of the meteor.

prawks3• 13 years ago

"Russia's deputy prime minister said Russia does not have the capability to shoot down meteors."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/02/15/russia-m...

jacquesm6• 13 years ago

Refreshingly honest. And that's probably true for the planet, not just for Russia. You can bet there will be a lot of people using this incident to try to get funding so they can go play while pretending they are going to save the planet at some unspecified future date.

mapt3• 13 years ago

Is is not an oxidized detonation explosion in the traditional sense, it's a hypersonic solid-gas fragmentation impact.

In this case, the most intense period involves peak pressure. The meteor falls down, encountering gradually thicker air, heating up and heating up, until finally, the pressure and differential internal stresses are sufficient to separate it into smaller pieces.

These smaller pieces are a lot less massive per surface area, so the pressure acting on them is going to be a lot more relative to their mass, and they are going to slow down much faster. The deceleration while this is going on, then, is going to induce sufficient turbulence to break them up even faster. So the breakup occurs in a sort of chain reaction, and the pressure waves from nearby fragments influence each other, adding turbulence and slowing the cloud of fragments further, until it all ends up as small particles spread over a large area. These particles are moving for the first fraction of a second of their life at supersonic velocities, generating a very large pocket of vacuum / shockwave as they dissipate their energies. The rapid expansion of the largest highly vulnerable layer of the asteroid into a cloud of dust thus constitutes an 'explosion', even if the energy is all kinetic instead of the slow chemical burning that happens afterwards as the white-hot particles oxidise & turn to ash.

Asteroids are not uniform, however. Wrap a chunk of granite in a chunk of sandstone, and you may end up chipping off bits of the sandstone for 10s, heating up until all the white-hot sandstone flies off in fragments at once for 2s, and then the granite flying further towards the ground until its yield strength is exceeded in a higher pressure regime, or it impacts the ground. With complex structures, multiple waves of fragmentation are possible, and rather than being a simple matter of the fragments immediately dissipating into small particles and a harder core, a meteor will tend to split into chunks which themselves become smaller examples of this phenomena.

wglb• 13 years ago

We just have to live with it

Or, alternatively, not.

Florin_Andrei3• 13 years ago

"So, humans, how's that space program coming along?" - a large rock

31reasons• 13 years ago

Its interesting coincidence i suppose that there is going to be a close flyby of a near earth asteroid on Feb 15th. Even google changed their doodle to remind that (but the doodle is gone now!)

Edit: Ah, its also in the news http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/02/asteroid-2012...

yeison• 13 years ago

Heh. I would've loved to see the article: 'Google Trolls Injured Russians with Doodle'

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

Does every car in Russia have a dashcam?

asselinpaul2• 13 years ago

quite a few, in case of accidents/fights, they serve as proof. The police is apparently quite corrupt too so it might be an insurance...

orangethirty• 13 years ago

Nasa TV link for those who want to watch as they report. http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

julieb612• 13 years ago

It's unfortunate this event is a wake up call. 99% of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are unknown. We at the B612 Foundation (http://b612foundation.org) are building a telescope for early warning detection. Everyone can get involved. Please visit our site to learn more... you can help!

alanfalcon2• 13 years ago

I'm reminded of scenes from Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" where rebelling Loonies plan to "throw rocks" at oppressive Earth.

Ingaz• 13 years ago

"Russian guy suffers the most"

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RussianGuySuffers...

Universe agrees with it: Tunguska and "УФО" are both in Russia.

I suppose that all other world can relax: something bad or REALLY BAD will go on head of "russkie"

(It was a joke)

ravishk• 13 years ago

Are there certain geographies or areas that are more prone to these incidents than others? Countries in northern hemispheres for example?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikhote-Alin_meteorite

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patomskiy_crater (Debatable meteorite origins)

lutusp• 13 years ago

> Are there certain geographies or areas that are more prone to these incidents than others?

No. An incoming meteor or asteroid is perfectly ecumenical with respect to location, therefore the vast majority of meteors fall into the oceans.

On a related note, the best time to see meteors is between midnight and dawn in whatever location you find yourself. The reason? At dawn, if you look straight up, you're looking in the direction Earth is moving in its orbit at thirty kilometers per second. By contrast, if you look straight up at sunset, you're looking at where Earth has just been and is receding from at thirty kilometers per second. Earth's velocity is added to that of the wandering space rocks near dawn, but is subtracted at sunset.

The Russian meteor even happened at dawn.

bane• 13 years ago

Living in the country, there are lots of long boring drives where you mind wanders and you grow up very familiar with what a "shooting star" looks like streaking against the night sky.

One day, driving home I happened to look out at something I thought was a plane and nearly drove off the road as I saw a meteroid falling silently through the sky. There was absolutely no sound and it moved much slower than I expected. After I regained control of my car and pulled it over to get out and watch, I saw small pieces silently broke away and the light show continued until it went over the horizon. It was totally unlike anything I'd ever seen before or since. It's dreamlike and beautiful.

I waited a few minutes after it went below the horizon since the angle it went on made me think it might have made it to the ground, but I never heard anything. It was never in the news, and nobody talked about it afterwards, for all I know I'm the only one who ever saw it. It was both terrifying and amazing. I had no idea what I was looking at since it didn't look like any picture of this phenomenon I'd ever seen.

One thing I'm sure of, is that I've never seen a video that ever does such a spectacle justice. There's so many subtle details that get completely obliterated on video.

Here's some video that do a pretty good job of showing what they look like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWhrW7lpqZM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyW0g1SIyxI

The videos of the one in Russia are on an entirely different scale. The sonic boom was tremendous, the amount of light being thrown off of that thing was unbelievable. Extrapolating from what I saw and how I now know video changes things, this must have been an unbelievable beautiful and terrifying sight.

GuiA• 13 years ago

Wow, those videos (and your story) are mindblowing.

I wonder what must have gone through the minds of our ancestors when, hundreds or thousands of years ago, they'd witness such events (let alone ones similar to the Russian meteor). A lot of old creation myths etc. make a lot more sense now :)

anovikov• 13 years ago

Both of these videos are of the disintegrating reentering satellites, not meteors.

caf2• 13 years ago

The CTBTO has a small release on the infrasound detection: http://newsroom.ctbto.org/2013/02/15/ctbto-infrasound-statio...

Raz0rblade• 13 years ago

And there was no link to the other meteor that passed earth today ??. Or did Nasa coverup that it didnt knew what trajectory it would take. It seams unlikely to me that those two events are not related.

I mean recently Nasa found some anomaly on Mars too, and then they say "no its not interesting its just erosion; (mars has next to none atmospheric pressure btw) i mean if i where a geologist, then any curious shape even if it was made by erosion would attract my attention i would take samples; and most likely such samples would be more interesting then dust-hole digging. What has become from NASA i wonder. Once they where explorers curious.. now they only call their device curiosity

chakalakasp5• 13 years ago

Those videos look like space junk re entering the atmosphere, unless they are very much slowed down. Meteors tend move much quicker than that.

Russian meteor largest in a century

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