Actually it was.
Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration
Posted on 02/16/2013 4:40:16 PM PST by Vince Ferrer
That celestial rock had been zooming along at 40,000 mph for thousands of years when it exploded over Russia on Friday — and that’s when it really picked up speed.
The first big meteorite of the media age rocketed through the consciousness of its target planet at the speed of Twitter. A rare event in a remote place went viral, thanks to the ubiquitous dashboard cameras of bad Russian drivers. And it instantly grabbed the attention of an electronic age that thought it was beyond being stunned by a bolt from space.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Just be glad it wasn’t a Tunguska event over a populated area. Yesterday’s meteor was a relatively small one.
Its pretty damn stupid that with our technology we decided that navel gazing was the way to go 40 years ago.
Considering that something larger and on a more direct
course could play havoc with mankind, I’d say it was
time we paid more attention, also that it was a SURPRISE!
Actually the meteor exploded with about 30 times the force of the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was not "relatively small". The fact is it exploded at 15+ miles above the earth which kept the damage at a minimum, had it come down lower before exploding the area that it hit would have been flattened. It was not a REMOTE area, it had upward of 1,000,000 people living there and over 1,000 were injured, minor injuries for the most part but still there would have been hundreds of thousands of people dead had it went off closer to the ground.
It does seem like a pretty clear shot across the bow doesn’t it. God gave us a large moon that protects us from many of these so the least we can do is pick up the slack on our end.
In my opinion the one that exploded over Russia yesterday is probably at the low limit of what we would need to deal with.
Personally I’m hoping this will spur even greater investment with those who seek to mine asteroids. After all, they would be the ones likely to get the contract to eliminate threats.
Go to YouTube and search on 'bad Russian drivers'. You won't believe some of the crazy wrecks you'll see.
Shoemaker-Levy 9 would have been an extinction level event if it hit here. Fortunately, those are less likely to hit Earth than Jupiter, as Jupiter’s size and gravity is what is capturing the comets. Jupiter creates its own problems, where the Earth does not.
I can’t help wondering if there might have been a time during the last 60 years when this kind of event might have set of an accidental war. Obviously it’s less likely these days.
Nothing wrong with this.
Here are a couple of impact simulators to play with.
http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth
http://simulator.down2earth.eu/
Actually, it wasn’t. Small compared to a 100 kiloton bomb but not small compared to a modern nuke of about 50 KT. If it had been only about 5 miles about the earth when it went off you could send notes to the people of that area telling them that it could have been worse, they could have been killed by a bigger meteor.
Dayum! How do you say asinine cruelty in Russian?
веселье
Vodka, though in this case all you see is beer. I’m sure some was involved.
In what sense did it "go off"? The idea of an explosion is very misleading, IMHO. It did flare up, but in the videos you can see shadows cast by the flare moving rapidly over the course of several seconds, so evidently the "explosion" was traveling at great speed through the air. But this is contradictory to the idea of an explosion, which is a localized release of energy that propagates a spherical shockwave.
I would expect to see a linear track of the concussive damage due to a conical shockwave, or sonic boom, caused by the hypersonic passage of the object through the air.
Less Likely? Last I heard the Russian military is blaming this on a new US weapon.
They're saying something like 40,000 MPH. What is that, Mach 6? No way is that concussion going to be spherical. I've seen the videos, and if that thing was 15 miles high it had to have been moving very fast indeed.
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