Meteorite Hunters Find the West Texas Fireball 64
An anonymous reader writes "A fireball streaked over Austin, Texas on February 15 producing sonic booms and startling people for hundreds of miles. The video of the event was shown on national television and viewed by thousands of people on the Net. The first news reports speculated that the fireball might have been debris from a February 13th collision between two satellites over Siberia but space experts said that the object was probably a meteor. Now this has been confirmed: experienced meteorite hunters located a strewnfield about 120 miles north of the filming site of the Austin cameraman and have recovered over 100 freshly fallen meteorites."
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (Score:1)
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as opposed to what? pole dancer style?
Debunked? (Score:2)
As for the "flashes" that were reported, Dr. Ciocca says there are some types of satellites that have reflective surfaces. These are called iridium satellites and they emit flashes in the sky when the sun's rays strike them at the right angle. He says many astronomy hobbyists even track those sorts of satellites.
Pure speculation... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Posting to undo my accidental offtopic mod. Sorry.
People continue to deny that this is an issue, but it happens often enough that it clearly is. I have noticed that it especially becomes a problem when using trackpads.
CmdrTaco: Please can you fix this now? Please?
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Looks like your subscription has expied, as had mine until just now...
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I wish to heck I knew how the mod point system worked. I used to get them on a weekly basis. Haven't had any in over a year now.
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I get mod points all the time, to the point that they get really annoying. I don't know the formula but I think it is related to current karma (currently Excellent), recent posting activity and any resulting moderations, plus metamoderation activity.
Since the switch to the firehouse-like metamoderation I haven't done it lately. And yet I am still getting moderator points every week or so. Sometimes it is only 5 if I have been inactive or acting rather trollish, but most of the time it is 15. I have 9 unuse
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Meteorites fall all the time. Just because a 30-meter asteroid makes the news, it doesn't suddenly make it the origin of every meteorite.
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Re:Pure speculation... (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, in such circumstances the Butterfly Effect has vastly more influence on small, irregular objects than it is on, say, a large, smooth, symmetrical, engineered re-entry vehicle.
Qualification (Score:3, Insightful)
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The Butterfly Effect refers to chaos theory, which states that, at a macroscopic level, large changes can be brought about in a system by factors that are relatively very small. This is often illustrated by relating the flapping of a butterfly's wings on one side of the Earth to the follow on effects leading to a hurricane on the other side of the planet.
I don't think it was the parent that referred to the effect wrongly, but the initial post where it was used to explain that smaller objects would be affect
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I brought it up to point out the fact that an irregular bunch of small rocks, even if they entered the upper atmosphere together, would be scattered very widely by the time they struck... if they were ever strike at all.
Re:Qualification (Score:4, Interesting)
The 5 meter ball will make a direct hit on Santa wiping out any Elves within a considerable radius.
The Iron atom on the other hand will start hiting single atoms/molecules. Suppose you could somehow freeze every atom in it's place before the Iron atom hit the atmosphere until it, hit the ground. (go away chemists).
If you have ever played pool you will understand how increadibly acurate that first contact the Iron atom makes would need to be to hit a five meter target on the ground.
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In a word: No
Objects in orbit don't really change direction in radically unpredictable ways.
Consider the asteroid 99942 Apophis [wikipedia.org]. There was some concern that it would hit Earth in 2029, but it has been determined that it will not. However, we also know that it will hit Earth in 2036 if (in 2029) it passes through a specific area a little under 2000 feet wide.
If we can calculate the probability of a specific asteroid hitting Earth 20-30 years from now, surely we can do it with one that is much closer?
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Unless the asteroid in question is small enough that it falls into the "OMFG HOW DID WE MISS THAT?!?! WE'RE DOOMED!!!" category. I can have a small asteroid knocking on our doorstep (a few hundred thousand kilometers, astronomically speaking) and still not be able to see it with the vast majority of instrumentation in our arsenal today.
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I think you're missing where I'm coming from [wikipedia.org]. A solid rock will indeed act as you have stated (pool table mechanics), but what if some of it was not so solid and it started to crumble under the gravity of close planetary (solar?) fly-by's, say a hundred orbits ago.
Coincidently, the "n-body problem" is a classical example of the "butterfly effect" (mentioned by Jane Q Public above).
I have absolutely no evidence that thi
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...but I wonder if it had anything to do with this [slashdot.org].
Are you suggesting an asteroid conspiracy?
OOOH, that West Texas Fireball... (Score:1, Offtopic)
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West, Texas, not West Texas (Score:5, Informative)
Re:West, Texas, not West Texas (Score:4, Informative)
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They shouted at her, "Don't eat that sausage roll !" ?
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I think kdawson's Google is broken...
Re:Feed the Trolls (Score:4, Informative)
The story is a lie. (Score:3, Funny)
It was a UFO, not a meteor!
This story about finding "meteorites" is just a government coverup!
Aliens walk among us.
The Rapture is near.
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midwest farms a productive source of meteorites (Score:4, Interesting)