Originally posted by CosmicCitizen
I saw a meteor hit in a field about 200 meters from the house late last night. It was pretty cool - it burst into blue sparks just before it hit the ground. I will go look for it later today.

edit on 8-12-2011 by CosmicCitizen because: (no reason given)

Find the pieces of it, if you can. If it's an iron meteor, use a metal detector if you can get your hands on one. If it's a chondrite meteor, lots of luck, because it won't look like anything but a bunch of rocks. Takes an expert to find those. But seriously, if you can find pieces they can be worth a LOT of money. Even small pieces can be worth hundreds of $$.

As for this finding, this is about what they expected to find, except that there's actually less near Earth asteroids out there then they had originally estimated they would find. That's fine, that's actually good for us because that means less of a chance one will hit us. The whole purpose of this study was to find these objects and track them so that if one were on course to hit us we'd have enough early warning to do something about it -- to actually nudge it into a safer orbit so it misses us. We might have to do this with Apophis, but we won't know until it makes it's next very close approach to the Earth. After that we'll know if our orbit has affected the thing in just such a way that it could strike us its next go round after that. If it will, we have ways of dealing with it, we just need to make sure the politicians realize it's a real threat and let the space agencies do what they have to do.