from the perhaps-god-wasn't-happy-with-the-earlier-story-from-Texas dept.
NASA Confirms 1,000-Pound Meteorite Landed in Texas:
Those who saw the meteoroid fly across the sky on Wednesday thought they saw a shooting star—until they lost sight of the fireball and felt its impact as it struck Earth. Home security footage from residents west of McAllen, Texas, shows the meteorite's impact shaking the ground, causing wildlife to flee and homes to shiver. Those who felt and heard the collision didn't know what to make of it, and with so-called "spy balloons" and UFO conspiracies in the news cycle at the time, their best guesses were unsettling. Thankfully, NASA's Johnson Space Center has since confirmed that the boom was caused by a meteorite, which struck Earth just north of Texas' border with Mexico.
NASA's Meteor Watch shared the agency's statement on Facebook. The meteorite is believed to have been about two feet wide and 1,000 pounds before it entered Earth's atmosphere at approximately 27,000 miles per hour. Atmospheric entry broke the meteorite into at least a few different fragments. American Meteor Society member and tireless fragment collector Robert Ward found the first of these pieces Saturday on private property in El Sauz, a tiny farm town an hour from McAllen's city center.
Meteorites themselves aren't uncommon, but impacts like this one are. Most rocky space masses burn up upon atmospheric entry, leaving only dusty particles in their wake. NASA says that car-sized asteroids strike Earth's atmosphere about once a year, creating a generous fireball and turning to dust before impacting the ground. Now and then, however, larger masses survive their passage through Earth's atmosphere. The consequences of such survival can be catastrophic.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday February 23, @09:20PM (3 children)
Thinking about recent articles, in which we are finding ever smaller rocks, further and further from earth. But we didn't see a half-ton rock falling through the atmosphere.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday February 23, @10:01PM (1 child)
Space is big, really big! The article mentioned below isn't even saying 35% of Near Earth Objects are tracked, it's just that they've been identified. Seeing an asteroid in a picture one time, isn't an active tracking system.
https://astronomy.com/news/2023/02/protecting-earth-from-dangerous-asteroids [astronomy.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Thursday February 23, @10:19PM
Poking ChatGPT for a while, I finally got it to spit out some numbers. Assuming a very good placement and good Telescope, we get 0.75% coverage of the night sky by one telescope. That would be somewhere north of 13k telescopes. That's a lot of observatories/telescopes.
How much of the night sky can the Mauna Kea Observatory view?
[Insert Lots of Rabbit Holes]
Assuming they use the wide-field camera, what percentage of the night sky is that?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Friday February 24, @12:24AM
Believe it or not, a half-ton rock is below the threshold of care here. They're worried about stuff that might destroy a city and/or start a nuclear war. In comparison, the Chelyabinsk meteor [wikipedia.org] was thought to be 17-20 meters in diameter with roughly a 500 kiloton release of energy, and the Tunguska event [wikipedia.org] with a diameter of perhaps 65 meters and an energy release around 12 megatons, both estimates with a lot of error. At a wild stab in comparison, the Chelyabinsk meteor would be about 30 times larger in radius and the suspected Tunguska object about 100 times larger. The Chelyabinsk meteor is barely at the threshold of significant damage.
That means that if we had the same albedo on these objects and all estimates are accurate, the McAllen meteor of the story was about three orders of magnitude dimmer (cross section area is proportional to radius squared) than an object that we'd care about and four orders of magnitude dimmer than a Tunguska class object that could kill millions of people.
Also, this affects detection range. If you see an object 1 million km out (a bit over 3 times the distance to the Moon), it takes crudely an hour to arrive at typical Solar System speeds. The apparent brightness of the object is roughly its detection threshold (though it's easier to detect in some incoming directions like ones that are opposite the Sun and near the plane of the Solar System where most such objects are expected to come from), and that's proportional to the radius of the object squared and inversely proportional to the distance from the observer squared. So basically, a Chelyabinsk meteor could be detected 30 times further away, and a Tunguska-class object 100 times further away.
TL;DR: We aren't going to build a space detection network for a McAllen class object. It's too small and does too little damage. But the objects we really would care about are much easier to detect. So not being able to detect a McAllen class object is not that big a deal.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Friday February 24, @12:10AM
You'd really hope that the meteorite would hit a megachurch, landing directly on the head of some bombastic self-serving prosperity gospel preacher trying to convince everyone he's specially blessed by the Almighty and you can be too if you give him all your money.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24, @03:16PM (1 child)
Let's build a new structure around this meteorite, claim that it has mystical properties, have a bumbling ranting psychopath give a speech about how a being only they can see said this meteor is from an invisible person in the sky who dictates how we should live but never actually shows up, and kill anyone who disagrees with this by decapitation. This is a brand new idea that has never been done before.
Are you in?
[ ] yes
[ ] I prefer decapitation
[ ] YES
[ ] I have an invisible person in the sky already and want the head removal option please
[ ] I will give my life, my soul, my wealth, my children for this meteor and this invisible person who only you can see
[ ] I am female and therefor my opinion does not count
[ ] I will gladly help anyone who opposes this teaching from this life as they are clearly wrong may everyone live in peace except those who refuse to believe and those who refuse to pay gold to our cause
[ ] I do not believe in invisible people who give orders about how we should live and therefore must die or pay money to be allowed to live as I am obviously evil as I am not one of you
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24, @03:25PM
[ ] I would like to buy some of your meteor to make a sword with the understanding that you will probably kill me for being such a heathen