http://www.nwipp-newspapers.com/FH/free/317107617035924.php
Posted on 02/10/2010 9:23:12 PM PST by TaraP
No pic yet..
Here is the Update:
Meteorite course in Hidalgo and Puebla alert!
The site of impact would have been Ahuazotepec Municipality, Puebla, bordering Cuautepec, Hidalgo, where a bridge collapsed and caused tension among people
A light accompanied by a roar which swayed buildings and houses about five municipalities of Puebla and Hidalgo, was attributed to the fall of a meteorite.
The site of impact would have been Ahuazotepec Municipality, Puebla, bordering Cuautepec, Hidalgo, where a bridge collapsed and caused tension among people, according to reports from local authorities.
The incident took place Wednesday on the stroke of 18:30 between the two populations, so far, the Army arrived to cordon off the area.
Civil Protection reported that Hidalgo helplines had collapsed with calls from frightened people who asked for an explanation about what was happening after the blast that shattered windows.
Security officers from the three river Hidalgo, Civil Protection and Fire’’and’’combed the area, until the day before did not give specific information.
The state Civil Defense director, Miguel Garcia Conde, said he received the report for which was investigated at airports the logs as it was feared a plane crash, but’’there is no report of loss of communication with some aircraft.’
http://www.nwipp-newspapers.com/FH/free/317107617035924.php
Sure it wasn’t a meth lab that blew?
I got 3 megatons.
Watch your sig figs.
That was the Iran punch. They have given up on nukes and have decided to drop rocks on the West.
Man, would I like to see the trebuchet that can fling boulders that size ;-)
Reported Meteorite fall between Puebla and Hidalgo (30 Meters)
I thought that you were going to show us a picture of a crater being much larger than one mile across, like a few miles across -- since it was about a 10-meter meteorite that hit the ground near Winslow, Arizona, and this one you were describing was three times bigger!!.
The Barringer Crater, near Winslow, Arizona, was created by a rock about 10 meters... hoo-boy! :-)
That crater is about one mile across, and only from a mere 10-meter rock.
I was just about ready to go outside and look in the sky to see the big cloud from the hit, too... but... then I saw that you were saying that the "CRATER" itself was only 30 meters... LOL...
Whew! :-)
That was probably made by something the size of a quarter or so...
But, really..., people should just realize that we're getting hit every single day by thousands of these things (if not more) and that over 100 tons of material end up on earth every day because of it... :-)
Outer space is quite busy, doncha know...
What is a NEO?
Near-Earth-Objects (NEOs) are small objects in the solar system (asteroids and short-period comets) with orbits that regularly bring them close to the Earth and which, therefore, are capable someday of striking our planet. Sometimes the term NEO is also used loosely to include all comets (not just short-period ones) that cross the Earth's orbit. Those NEOs with orbits that actually intersect the Earth's orbit are called Earth-Crossing-Objects (ECOs).
What size NEOs are dangerous?
The Earth's atmosphere protects us from most NEOs smaller than a modest office building (40 m diameter, or impact energy of about 3 megatons). From this size up to about 1 km diameter, an impacting NEO can do tremendous damage on a local scale. Above an energy of a million megatons (diameter about 2 km), an impact will produce severe environmental damage on a global scale. The probable consequence would be an "impact winter" with loss of crops worldwide and subsequent starvation and disease. Still larger impacts can cause mass extinctions, like the one that ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago (15 km diameter and about 100 million megatons).
How many NEOs exist?
There are many more small NEOs than large ones. Astronomers estimate that there are approximately 1100 Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) larger than 1 km in diameter, and more than a million larger than 40 m in diameter (the approximate threshold for penetration through the Earth's atmosphere). The largest NEAs are less than 25 km in diameter. There are probably many more comets than NEAs, but they spend almost all of their lifetimes at great distances from the Sun and Earth, so that they contribute only about 10% to the census of larger objects that strike the Earth, and probably less than 1% of NEOs less than 1 km in diameter.
Who is searching for NEOs?
Several teams of astronomers worldwide are surveying the sky with electronic cameras to find NEOs, but the total effort involves fewer than 100 people. The most productive NEO survey is the LINEAR search program of the MIT Lincoln Lab, carried out in New Mexico with US Air Force and NASA support. The LINEAR team, which operates two search telescopes with one-meter aperture, discovers more asteroids than all the other searches combined. Other active survey groups include the NEAT search program in Hawaii, carried out jointly by the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and the US Air Force; the Spacewatch survey at the University of Arizona, funded by NASA and a variety of private grants, the LONEOS survey at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona, supported by NASA grants, and the Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson Arizona, also supported by NASA. Other astronomers (many of them amateurs) follow up the discoveries with supporting observations.
Are any NEOs predicted to hit the Earth?
As of the end of 2004, astronomers had discovered more than two thirds of the larger Near Earth Asteroids (diameter greater than 1 km). None of the known asteroids is a threat, but we have no way of predicting the next impact from an unknown object. The count of known NEAs can be obtained daily from the NASA Program Office website at .
What is the risk of impacts?
We don't know when the next NEO impact will take place, but we can calculate the odds. Statistically, the greatest danger is from an NEO with about 1 million megatons energy (roughly 2 km in diameter). On average, one of these collides with the Earth once or twice per million years, producing a global catastrophe that would kill a substantial (but unknown) fraction of the Earth's human population. Reduced to personal terms, this means that you have about one chance in 40,000 of dying as a result of a collision. Such statistics are interesting, but they don't tell you, of course, when the next catastrophic impact will take placeónext year or a million years from now. The purpose of the Spaceguard Survey is not to improve these statistical estimates, but to find any individual rock that may be on a collision course.
How much warning will we have?
With so many of even the larger NEOs remaining undiscovered, the most likely warning today would be zero -- the first indication of a collision would be the flash of light and the shaking of the ground as it hit. In contrast, if the current surveys actually discover a NEO on a collision course, we would expect many decades of warning. Any NEO that is going to hit the Earth will swing near our planet many times before it hits, and it should be discovered by comprehensive sky searches like Spaceguard. In almost all cases, we will either have a long lead time or none at all.
Is there a problem with blind spots in the Spaceguard Survey?
Some press reports express concern that an asteroid could hit the Earth coming out of a "blind spot", such as the daylight sky or high southern latitudes where no Spaceguard telescopes are looking. Some worry that if an asteroid is found after its closest approach to Earth, this is an indication that the system is not working. These concerns seem to be based on the misconception that we are trying to detect asteroids as they approach the Earth on their final plunge toward impact. In fact, any such last-minute warning system is impractical as well as unproductive. In this survey, it makes no difference if a NEA is discovered on approach or departure from the vicinity of the Earth. The important thing is that it is discovered and its orbit determined. The only effect of blind spots, whether they be due to sunlight or moonlight or bad weather or lack of a southern hemisphere survey telescope, is to slow down the completion of the NEA catalog. Objects in blind spots will be picked up later, usually within a few years, in a more favorable geometry.
How can we protect ourselves?
NEO impacts are the only major natural hazard that we can effectively protect ourselves against, by deflecting (or destroying) the NEO before it hits the Earth. The first step in any program of planetary defense is to find the NEOs; we can't protect against something we don't know exists. We also need a long warning time, at least a decade, to send spacecraft to intercept the object and deflect it. Many defensive schemes have been studied in a preliminary way, but none in detail. In the absence of active defense, warning of the time and place of an impact would at least allow us to store food and supplies and to evacuate regions near ground zero where damage would be the greatest.
What is the government doing about it?
The US Congress held hearings to investigate the impact hazard in 1993, 1998, and 2002, and both NASA and the US Air Force are supporting surveys to discover NEOs. In 1998 NASA formally initiated the Spaceguard Survey by adopting the objective of finding 90% of the NEAs larger than 1 km diameter within the next decade (that is, before the end of 2008). In 1998 NASA also created a NEO Program Office, and today $3-4 million per year is being spent on NASA-supported NEO searches and orbit calculations. Other governments have expressed concern about the NEO hazard, but none has yet funded any extensive surveys or related defense research. A private Spaceguard Foundation based in Europe promotes NEO surveys internationally, and further interest on an international basis is provided by the International Astronomical Union, the International Council of Scientific Unions, and the United Nations.
What about smaller, more frequent impacts?
The Spaceguard Survey and most associated search and tracking programs are concentrating on NEAs larger than 1 km in diameter -- large enough to risk a global ecological catastrophe if one of them hit the Earth. But there are many more smaller undiscovered NEAs, and we are likely to be hit somewhere on Earth by one of these, with an energy equivalent to a large nuclear bomb, sometime in the next couple of centuries. The last such impact was in 1908 in Tunguska ( Siberia ) with an estimated explosive energy of 15 megatons. The actual risk to each of us from Tunguska-like impacts is very small -- much less than the risk of larger impacts, and indeed much less than the risk from many common natural hazards, such as earthquakes and severe storms. Nevertheless, there are people who are interested in this problem. In 2003 NASA completed a study of these sub-km impacts and concluded that it was both technically feasible and cost-effective to to mount an expanded Spaceguard Survey, with much larger telescopes, to search for these smaller asteroids.
David Morrison, September 2004
This is just what papers sometimes put in their articles to "spice it up" -- being some file they had on hand to make the article look "interesting" ... doncha know... :-)
Well, that’s a possibility, too.
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Too many chupracabras appeared afterwards, for it to have been a drug lab.
I'm hip.
The google translation was somewhat inadequate, so I looked at the original Spanish. Then I read the comments. These people say as much nasty stuff about their government as we do here in FR. “Meteor should have landed on congress.”, etc.
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