Russian Meteorite Shows How Much Damage Could Be Done By Something Larger

[TheMastersNemesis]

This Russian meteorite hit was not a direct hit, yet it damaged a lot of buildings' glass. The shock wave was pretty substantial. It was more like a fly over. You have to wonder what it would have been like if the meteorite were 20 or 40 tons as it went over. Buildings could have been smashed by the shock wave from its wake.

If I have my physics right a 20 ton meteorite would have been 4 times more damaging because of the exponential factor. And a 40 ton meteorite would have been 16 times the effect.

So even a close flyby in the lower atmosphere would wreak havoc for thousands of miles on the path of such an object. I wonder how we would fare in a "small government" mindset with a really serious threat that could be managed even months in advance. Would corporate America or an international corporation be able to save us for a profit?

Somehow our present logic about government seems absurd. A huge even will not just effect one state or one country. We are kidding ourselves into believing we are NOT in this world together.

BTW I believe the Tanguska event was a large flyby. No fragments have been found so it broke up or was a close fly by.

[Mnemosyne]

1. This is probably an ignorant question, but is there a possibility that the meteorite caused the

earthquakes in Siberia yesterday? Thanks for any info!

[TheMastersNemesis]

3. Probably Not Because

it looked like it did not impact directly but broke up. Even though the shock wave was substantial I doubt it was large enough to cause such events.

Then again you never know.

[Mnemosyne]

5. Thanks MN! Just seemed strange that there haven't been any there for quite awhile and it started

yesterday.

[FSogol]

9. Universal Warming.

[Mnemosyne]

10. Huh? nt

[Posteritatis]

13. It did make it to the surface, but the impactor was pretty tiny.

Any meteorite big enough to create tangible quakes would cause profoundly more damage than this one did.

[rdharma]

2. An asteroid is a large meteor......

Just sayin'.

[get the red out]

4. It's always a potential disaster

Something I hope NASA is keeping in mind! Going to Mars and back to the Moon are great; but I hope they are looking at possible ways of saving life on Earth from the fate of the dinosaurs if it is ever necessary.

[TheMastersNemesis]

6. I Was Watching Nightline Last Night And

there were some astrophysicists they interviews that said that with large objects that might threaten us you could nudge them out of our orbit or past us with very small corrections months in advance. All you have to do is slow them down speed them up or nudge them in very slight ways.

Blowing them up would be the worse thing because you might create a meteor storm. That is why an early warning with response time would be very helpful.

Also I believe the earth is moving at 36 MPS so it is a very fast moving target. And we have the technology now to determine the orbits of objects thanks to Newton who was probably the most brilliant scientist in history.

[get the red out]

8. That's great

I don't need for them to blow them up, I just hope they're working on figuring out how to "nudge". We're a fast-moving target but there's plenty of evidence that strikes from large objects have happened in the past so we might as well assume that sooner or later.

All interesting stuff.

[longship]

7. Phil Plait -- the Bad Astronomer

And everybody knows that Tunguska event was a interdimensional cross-rip!

Jees! Get it right, eh?

[MicaelS]

11. Tunguska was no fly-by.

It exploded with a force equivalent to 10-15 MEGATONS of TNT. That is 1,000 times the the power of the Little Boy atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima. Tunguska was equivalent to the Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb exploded by the US on March 1,1954 at Bikini Atoll.

Leading theories are that Tunguska was a either a stony asteroid, or a comet that exploded at 5-10 kilometers altitude.

Good article at Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

[TheMastersNemesis]

12. Very True

I knew it never hit the ground but was unsure if it exploded or not. We seem to forget that a meteor on a flyby can be just as devastating. We do not have to get a direct hit to have a problem. The meteor shows how vulnerable the planet is.

As for the Bikini Atoll blast there is an unusual anecdote about that test. As it turns our they used isotopes of lithium as one of the drivers of the bomb. They had lithium 4 and lithium 6 and as I understood the video on it lithium 4 was supposed to be inert so it was 2/3 of the material they used. Lithium 6 was the more volatile part that was apparently mixed with other critical material. When they exploded the bomb was that lithium 4 got converted into lithium 6 at detonation and they ended up with a blast 3x larger than they planned.

It was so large they had to rush to some nearby bunkers to rescue scientists who would have been fried by radiation in the aftermath.