Russian meteorite 1,000 times bigger than originally thought!

Originally posted by wonderboy2402

Originally posted by Helious

Russian meteorite 1,000 times bigger than originally thought Read more: www.foxnews.com...

www.foxnews.com

Later in the evening, after studying infrasound data from stations around the world, NASA released a new estimate revising that first guess upward by a thousand-fold: The meteorite actually weighed closer to 10,000 tons, scientists said.

Read more: www.foxnews.com...

(visit the link for the full news article)

edit on 19-2-2013 by Helious because: (no reason given)

Foxnews huh. Somehow I need more evidence.

Ok, head off to check NASA who's data has been directly quoted in the news source. I'll wait for your confirmation!

Everyone had their lines set for the big fish and the little minnow came in and took a bite out of Russia.

10,000 tons?
Really?
OK i call bullship.....
yhay would have rivalled the Tungutska blast of 1907
it would for sure have totalled the city, i mean levelled it too....

Hmmmmmlets see 10,000 tons at 22000 mph + how many kilotons?

10,000 tons is not that big and would be correct for the size and strength of the blast. 10,000 tons is about the size of medium sized 3 bedroom house. Way smaller than the Tungska rock. It shattered several times as can be seen in the videos but the final shattering was not caught on any video. So it sounds big but therea lot of house sized rocks out there and they are too small to track.

Originally posted by Zcustosmorum
It truly is frightening stuff that this got through undetected, what if it was bigger still?

www.liveleak.com...

The best reason it was undetected is that it came from the direction of the Sun, meaning for weeks it was in a daylight sky as it approached. If it were in a night sky, it is very possible it would have been detected by an amateur comet watcher or an observatory. A very scary scenario for future detections, unless we get a detector to orbit the Sun at 180 degrees opposite Earth's orbit.

Well. My only real question is where is this 10000 tonnes of debris?

Was the explosion so high in the atmosphere that it was all carried away much further into the unknown? Or was the explosion so violent and complete that it atomized the bulk of this 10000 tonnes so that it is now blowing in the wind.

What if..... this 10000 tonne rock had 400 tonnes of highly radioactive material embedded in it? What if that material was evenly distributed all over that certain area in Russia. What if that was a demonstration of "catching an asteroid"

Interesting times

If it was ten thousand tons, it had to have been made out of 'Cosmic Cotton Candy', or one of my Son-in-Laws 'neutron' cookies. He makes these cookies out of some really bizzare kind of whole wheat, and they're like really dense, like Quasar dense! But man they are good. One of those cookies coming into the atmosphere at that speed, Yeah, I can see it !

I wish I still had the link. But I was reading the story to my wife, and I distinctly remember telling her 7000 tons and the size of two school buses. She thought that was heavy for it's size, so we then of course started looking through my rock collection. I tossed her a piece of quartz, then a piece of hematite, to illustrate density differences.
So I think that going up a few thousand tons is not that big of a deal.

However, if you are FOX news and want to write a BIG headline...you say THOUSANDFOLD, then quote the smallest original size estimate you can Drudge up..

reply to post by Helious


Yeah I thought it was a pretty big shocker when I watched about it with my dad. I was thinking.. they were crazy lucky. It was just small enough, and burned up just enough. Had it held together a bit more/been a bit larger and airburst over the city it would have flattened some people.

Very ironic it happened on the day when we were all worried about that fly by which was oddly downplayed. I know the asteroid coming by wasn't big enough to do to much damage, (well speaking on a worldwide scale), but 17,000 miles is probably about the give or take margin of error with nasa on the distances of these things in most cases. I mean last year we were shocked about one coming inside of our moon.


The Earth definitely seems to be in a rocky spot wherever we are bobbing through these days.

Originally posted by Zcustosmorum
It truly is frightening stuff that this got through undetected, what if it was bigger still?

www.liveleak.com...

Well.... it would have been a bigger bang...!!!

10,000 tonnes of water = 10,000 cubic metres - which is 20m x 20m x 25m - it's not all that big - I mean it's not like a moon or anything.

And if it's loaded with iron it's going to be smaller.

I was always under the impression that a small 'dense' object, detonating very low in the Earths atmosphere will cause a large amount of damage compared to a large 'dense' object that detonates higher up in the atmosphere. I think it has something to do with whats known as a 'pre-cursor wave'. Looking at some of the shockwave damage, I think it may have been small/dense/low versus large/dense/high, Whatever it was, I'm sure glad it happened in 2013 instead of 1984 !

reply to post by Helious


1000 times bigger than originally thought? And they say 15 meters in diameters? That would mean they originally thought it was 1.5 cm big. It seems they where originally very dumb, or something doesn´t smell right here.

I'm not surprised by the varying reports of the meteors dimensions/mass, after all it must be hard to measure something traveling at six miles per second.

Originally posted by NeoVain
reply to post by Helious

 

1000 times bigger than originally thought? And they say 15 meters in diameters? That would mean they originally thought it was 1.5 cm big. It seems they where originally very dumb, or something doesn´t smell right here.

It doesn't work like that with mass.

Weird. According to my calculations, if the initial figure for a 15m radius is correct, the volume in cubic centimeters would be:

(4 / 3) * 3.14159265358979 * (1500 ^ 3) = 14137 million cubic centimeters

Then according to this page, the density of a stony/iron meteorite is around 4.25 g/cm3 (Mesosiderite), so:

14137 * 4.25 = 60000 tons. That's quite a stretch for error margin isn't it? Unless a) the size/type of the meteorite is different than initially thought and/or b) the official weight calculation is still wrong.

Also if this was 60000 tons and Tunguska was 100000 tons, why such different outcomes?

reply to post by Deny777


NASA has estimated the meteor's diameter to be 17 m. That's a radius of 8.5 m, a volume of 2572.44 m³, and a mass (based on the density you gave) of 10,933 tons.

reply to post by Retikx

Well. My only real question is where is this 10000 tonnes of debris?

Most of it will remain in the air until it precipitates.

What if..... this 10000 tonne rock had 400 tonnes of highly radioactive material embedded in it? What if that material was evenly distributed all over that certain area in Russia. What if that was a demonstration of "catching an asteroid"

Or what if the meteor was hollow, except for a solitary little speck of dust suspended inside? And what if that speck of dust was actually a planet called Whoville? Just think of all those poor little Whos!

Originally posted by Deny777
Weird. According to my calculations, if the initial figure for a 15m radius is correct, the volume in cubic centimeters would be:

(4 / 3) * 3.14159265358979 * (1500 ^ 3) = 14137 million cubic centimeters

Then according to this page, the density of a stony/iron meteorite is around 4.25 g/cm3 (Mesosiderite), so:

14137 * 4.25 = 60000 tons. That's quite a stretch for error margin isn't it? Unless a) the size/type of the meteorite is different than initially thought and/or b) the official weight calculation is still wrong.

Also if this was 60000 tons and Tunguska was 100000 tons, why such different outcomes?

edit on 20/2/2013 by Deny777 because: (no reason given)

I was going to reply but then I realized I needed a scientific calculator and a glass of red wine first, carry on!

Originally posted by Helious
wouldn't something with that much mass and traveling at such a high velocity create a large crater instead of almost completely evaporating before hitting the surface?

You (like many people) are not taking into account the density of our atmosphere.

To you and me, since we live in it, air seems like nothing. However, to a big rock, that's traveling along at 18 km/s, hitting the dense air of the lower atmosphere is like throwing an egg at a brick wall.

These big objects can only fully penetrate the atmosphere if they stay intact. As soon as they start to break up, the surface area to volume ratio starts to increase, and along with it so does air resistance which has the effect of rapidly slowing down the fragments.

For example - take a handful of dry flour, and try to throw it as far as you can. It won't get very far! Now take the same amount of flour, wrap it tightly in clingfilm, and try to launch it as far as you can again. It will go a whole lot further thanks to the low surface area to volume ratio.

Our atmosphere is very good as stopping these quite large rocks. The fact that there were only minor injuries due to a 10,000 tonne rock (the largest since Tunguska) entering the atmosphere is testimony to this.