No, I don’t think that Russian jet was hit by a meteor, but just hypothetically, how big would a space rock have to be to destroy a plane like that?
From the American Meteor Society:
Doesn’t directly answer your question, but by the time most meteors get down to 25-30 thousand feet, they’ll be moving 100/200 mph tops.
It’d hurt to put one of those through an engine or windshield. A bowling ball size object might hit hard enough to hole a wing tank on a 747.
1 solid 1kg object moving 200fps vs the aluminum skin of an airliner doesent sound like a great combination, the speed of the plane will probably contribute to the damage.
A lot depends on what gets hit. Some points on an airliner are more critical than others.
I think that in theory a space rock hitting the exact wrong spot on an airliner could bring it down… but it’s really, really unlikely to happen to any particular plane.
Like hitting the cockpit/pilots, for example… :eek:
Would probably have to take out both pilots - planes have been successfully landed after the cockpit was breached and one of the pilots disabled.
Destroying the ability to control the plane would likewise be fatal, but there are multiple backups.
And, of course, a big enough rock will just destroy the airplane, but those are extremely rare.
Makes me wonder how damaging an ‘exploded-in-atmosphere’ meteor’s debris ‘cloud’ might be if plane’s velocity and the incoming smallish chunks of meteor’s leftovers intersected at same point in-flight head-on.
Kinda seems that plane could very well take many smallish hits, similar to shotgun’s spread when fired, I guess. I really don’t know how dense in volume, on average, the remnants of an airbursted meteor can be, so am merely speculating that it could cause multiple areas of damage to plane under statistically unlikely conditions. I do know from watching that series about the Meteor Men (or similar title?) that is is not unusual to find a number of chunks of a burst metor linerally not too far apart, so it would seem that there would be a ‘cloud’ of stuff that plane might go through. I could be wrong, of course.
In the right place at the engines 1/4" would do i suspect.
At cruise speed, ice is not much softer than rock. Jet aircraft fly through hail shafts on occasion. Damage is pretty well guaranteed. But taking out the whole aircraft is pretty rare. The only case I’m aware of that was provably hail taking down a jet was this one: Southern Airways Flight 242 - Wikipedia.
The hail wrecked the engines and they deadsticked it into a survivable-for-some landing on a rural road. But for a pole line along the road they might have almost all survived.
The density & volume of hail they flew through was vastly greater than anything a single meteor could produce. They flew through a waterfall of ice at least a half mile across.
Going back to the info quoted in post #2 …
If we take the extreme values they quote, it’s a rock moving at ~27,000 FPS at 48,000 ft. An airliner in the high 30s or low 40s (where most cruise nowadays) might encounter it still going 10,000+ FPS. Plus some vector portion of the aircraft speed, ~800 FPS.
And naturally, the bigger it is, the better it’ll maintain speed as it descends. At the limit, dust slows very quickly whereas a planet killer will hardly slow down at all before impact.
For comparison, modern aircraft cannon fire rounds at around 3500 FPS. Which projectiles weigh on the order of 6-8 oz & fit easily in one’s hand. Typically the rounds are explosive, but it doesn’t take many even inert training rounds to shred a fatal hunk of an aircraft.
Kinetic energy is = 1/2 mass * velocity ^2. from 3500 FPS to 10,000FPS is ~10x the energy. And although rocky meteors aren’t real dense, the iron nickel ones are very dense. So we’re talking a big hunk o’ KE being deposited on impact.
Given the above higher speeds I would expect a single fragment the size of a tennis ball would be dangerous and one the size of a bowling ball would usually be a kill almost no matter where it hit.
The size distribution of meteors is inherently exponential and that’s before they’re ablated or disintegrated on reentry. Bottom line: there are millions of incoming dust particles per bowling ball. And the sky is very big whereas aircraft, though numerous, are very small on a planetary scale.
We will probably get through the lifetime of what we recognize as aviation without losing an aircraft to a meteor.
Perhaps this Earth Impact Calculator can be brought into play: Impact Earth