Edit: I just read the CNN article. Someone in the lower third is advocating an meteor/asteroid warning and defence system of satellites. IMO, not technologically feasible at this time.
We should have listen to Ned Scott, or at least Jack Horkheimer.
I remember that factoid from “Lucifer’s Hammer.” One of the characters tossed stones into the sandbox to prove it to himself.
Jesus hates commies?
Well, we could probably set up a spotting/warning system if we really wanted to do so… but there isn’t a damn thing can do a present to prevent a flying rock from hitting our planet. Maybe, with enough warning, we could evacuate an area but that’s about it.
And ironically enough I read that book recently but forgot that part.
Another good book, I found the ending where they are willing to fight and die to preserve scientific knowledge from another impending Dark Age rather affecting actually…
Seems about as effective a wrath-of-god effort as striking the southern US, but sparing San Francisco, with a hurricane out of displeasure with gay people… given that the communists didn’t take over Russia for quite a while after Tunguska, and lost power long before this event. Maybe Jesus wants communism!
Nitpick - the physics of hypervelocity impacts and of regular old rocks-falling-in-a-sandbox impacts are pretty different. Any fragments from this event in Russia would probably have slowed down to terminal velocity and had effects more like the rocks in the sandbox, but objects big enough to make an ‘impact crater’ in the ‘craters-on-the-moon’ sense would have plowed right through the atmosphere with enough speed that the object would have been completely destroyed on impact, or nearly so. The supersonic shock wave the propagates through the target rock, the vapourization and melting of the impactor and part of the target, and the evolution of the structure in the moments after the initial formation of the cavity all make for a pretty different process.
Such hypervelocity impacts create essentially circular craters except for very oblique impacts (current thinking is around 10° or less above horizontal), or in cases of very unusual target topography.
G-d would not strike the Bible Belt, and capitalize that “S”, pardner!
Another exception; I recall reading that objects that are captured in orbit around a planet with atmosphere and whose orbits eventually decay from atmospheric friction do leave oblong craters, presumably due to both a lower velocity and hitting at an angle. I understand that Mars has an equatorial belt of such craters (actually two belts; its crust tilted over at some point in its distant past, so what is now the equator didn’t used to be).
How is the equator defined? I thought it was the line between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
I just saw a couple of astronomers being interviewed, and they confirmed that the meteor came from the general direction of the sun, so it appears it’s just a coincidence that it arrived the same day as the larger asteroid.
A line that in the case of Mars, moved; at least the crust appear to have done so back in prehistory. Apparently major volcanic activity changed the balance of the crust with a massive buildup of dense rock away from the original equator, resulting in the crust sliding over the mantle until balance was restored. That doesn’t happen to Earth because of the tidal effects of our large, close moon.
But was it a big coincidence or a little coincidence?
it’s a late coincidence, by about two months.
Fun Cracked.com article about this topic:
Or as Joanna Newsom put it:
That theory seems to be borne out by reports of another alleged meteorite explosion over Cuba…
According to preliminary calculations from NASA and others, the bolide weighed in the vicinity of 10 tons and exploded at an altitude of between 30 and 50 kilometers with a yield of 500 kilotons.
That is roughly 30 times the energy released by the atom bomb in Hiroshima.
Holy frak – this appears to be the biggest meteor event since Tunguska.
There you go, Russia – two for two in the “being hit by the biggest meteor in the last 120 years” category!
Ghostbuster Ray: You have been a participant in the biggest interdimensional cross rip since the Tunguska blast of 1909!
(1909. 1908. Whatever.)
June 30, (June 17 Old Style Russian) 1908.