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Twin_Star Profane, Harsh, Unharmonious
Great Old One Joined: 05 May 2009 Total posts: 180 Gender: Unknown |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21362 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
 Posted: 20-11-2009 07:25 Post subject: |
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Thanks for that.
Utahns! There's a scary word - I expect to see 'Doctor Who and the Utahns' sometime soon!  |
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| Timble2 Imaginary person Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Total posts: 7114 Location: Practically in Narnia Age: 58 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 20-11-2009 10:56 Post subject: |
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| rynner2 wrote: |
Thanks for that.
Utahns! There's a scary word - I expect to see 'Doctor Who and the Utahns' sometime soon! |
Mormons from Outer Space! |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 04-02-2010 14:30 Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
'Fireball' lights up Irish sky
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8497600.stm
Artist's impression of a meteorite fall
An artist's impression of a meteorite fall
A fireball, thought to be a meteor, was spotted in the sky by people from all over the island of Ireland at about 1800 GMT on Wednesday.
People in Armagh, Craigavon and Omagh reported sightings to the police, and it was also seen on the Glenshane Pass.
The Northern Ireland Coastguard also took calls from people who believed the fireball had landed in Lough Neagh.
In the Republic, Valentia Coastguard said it took calls about sightings in Counties Westmeath, Limerick and Cork.
'Fantastic speed'
Joss Scott was driving along the Glenshane Pass when she spotted the fireball in the sky.
"It was a very bright green, with an orange trail coming from it.
"It was travelling at fantastic speed, very high up in the sky, and it was heading north.
"It then went behind these black clouds over the Sperrins, towards Dungiven, then there was this large orange flash, so I'm not sure if it landed somewhere around there.
"It was quite a spectacle," she said.
Terry Moseley from the Irish Astronomical Association said such an occurrence was "extremely rare" and said there was a chance that some of it may have survived and fallen to earth as a meteorite.
"What it probably was is a small asteroid, which is a piece of space rock which has collided with the earth and burned up at very high atmosphere," he explained.
"It seems to have travelled over most of Ireland, roughly from south to north and there is a possibility that a meteorite fell at the end of that, possibly somewhere in County Armagh."
'Pretty unusual'
He said it was very important for anyone who saw it to report their sighting and suggested contacting either the Armagh Observatory or the Irish Astronomical Association.
"We'll collate all the reports, and the more reports we get, the greater the chance of us recovering some of it, if it did fall.
"It is pretty unusual that you would get one that is so widely seen, and that is so bright."
Mr Moseley said there were "only about half a dozen" recorded meteorite falls in Ireland.
"The last one was in 1999, and the last one in the North was in County Derry in 1969," he said.
If you have any pictures of the fireball, please send them to us at nipics@bbc.co.uk |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21362 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
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| eburacum Papo-Furado
Great Old One Joined: 26 Aug 2005 Total posts: 1587 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 05-02-2010 13:41 Post subject: |
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Wait a cotton-pickin' minute there! A 100,000 mph meteor? That is faster than any object orbiting the Sun. If the figure given by the Mail is correct, that meteor came from interstellar space. Somehow I think the journalists have messed it up again.
Last edited by eburacum on 05-02-2010 14:33; edited 1 time in total |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 05-02-2010 13:57 Post subject: |
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| eburacum wrote: | | Wait a cotton-pickin' minute there! A 100,000 mph meteor? That is faster than any object orbiting the Sun. If the figure given by the Irish times is correct, that meteor came from interstellar space. Somehow I think the journalists have messed it up again. |
Or it was a powered object... |
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| eburacum Papo-Furado
Great Old One Joined: 26 Aug 2005 Total posts: 1587 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 05-02-2010 14:28 Post subject: |
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| They just love coming here to crash and burn, don't they? |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21362 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 05-02-2010 16:42 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | A 100,000 mph meteor? That is faster than any object orbiting the Sun. |
Actually, Mercury is faster - 105,946 mph.
And according to Wolfram Alpha, the average speed of the Earth around the sun is 67,566 mph. But something in an elliptical orbit with a more distant aphelion would be travelling far faster than that when it crosses Earth's orbit. And if this something happened to be orbiting at an acute angle to the ecliptic, or even in a retrograde direction, the collision speed could well be around 100,000 mph or so.
(I'm not saying it was in the case of the Irish meteor, but it's not impossible.  )
Last edited by rynner2 on 06-02-2010 16:04; edited 2 times in total |
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| eburacum Papo-Furado
Great Old One Joined: 26 Aug 2005 Total posts: 1587 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 05-02-2010 18:48 Post subject: |
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| I suppose it could have been retrograde after all- doh! |
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| eburacum Papo-Furado
Great Old One Joined: 26 Aug 2005 Total posts: 1587 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 05-02-2010 21:48 Post subject: |
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| Apparently 100,000 mph is quite reasonable for cometary, rather than asteroid, debris. So no extrasolar meteor required. Shame, really... |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21362 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 08-02-2010 10:15 Post subject: |
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This reads a bit like the plot for a TV play!
Doctors and lawyers fight over ownership of meteorite from asteroid belt
The meteorite is being kept at the Smithsonian during the ownership battle
Matt Spence in Washington
Late last month Marc Gallini got out of his chair in his medical examination room when a chunk of meteorite smashed through the roof and hit the spot where he would have been sitting, had a patient not just cancelled his appointment.
“It just wasn’t my time, I guess,” Dr Gallini said. His partner, Frank Ciampi, described the moment the tennis-ball-sized piece of rock hit the building in northern Virginia as “like an explosion went off”.
There the tale of a lucky escape might have ended, but the doctors’ landlord heard of the incident. The meteorite is now at the centre of a legal struggle for ownership involving the doctors, the landlord and one of the country’s leading museum and research bodies. “Once we discovered what it was, our first instinct was to donate the meteorite to the Smithsonian Institution,” Dr Ciampi told The Times. They were offered a $5,000 (£3,200) finder’s fee by the organisation, which houses nearly half of the 27,000 meteorites in collections around the world.
“We wanted to donate the money to Haiti,” he added. “We even talked to [our landlord] and he thought donating the money was a great idea.”
Before long, Dr Ciampi said, “meteorite hunters started showing up”. According to one, Steve Arnold of a cable television show called Meteorite Men, the meteorite could fetch between $25,000 and $50,000 — at which point the owners of the building suddenly became interested.
A few days later the doctors received an e-mail from the landlord, Erol Mutlu, saying that his brother, Deniz, was on his way to the Smithsonian to claim the rock. In a subsequent e-mail claiming ownership of the meteorite, The Washington Post reported, Mr Mutlu wrote: “It’s evident that ownership is tied to the landowner. The courts have ruled that a meteorite becomes part of the land where it arrives through ‘natural cause’ and the property of the landowner; the notion of ‘finders keepers’ has been rejected by the Supreme Court of Oregon.”
The doctors hired a lawyer to contact the Smithsonian to prevent release of the rock until ownership had been established. The two sides are at a stand-off and are apparently determined to take the issue to court. The museum is staying out of the row but using the time that it has the meteorite to study it. Tim McCoy, a mineral sciences curator at the Smithsonian, said that the rock, which comes from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter would allow scientists to look back about 4.6 billion years as it contained “the primitive stuff left over from the birth of the solar system”.
Dr Ciampi said that he was “praying it all gets settled quickly and [the meteorite] stays at the Smithsonian”.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7018501.ece |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 10-02-2010 18:17 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Meteorite fragments unlikely - astronomer
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0210/1224264113279.html
PAMELA NEWENHAM
Wed, Feb 10, 2010
DIRECTOR OF Armagh Observatory Prof Mark Bailey has said it is “highly unlikely” any fragments from a fireball seen by thousands of people last week will be found.
However, David Moore, chairman of Astronomy Ireland, urged members of the public to continue reporting sightings of it and said a meteorite had probably landed somewhere in Co Donegal.
An estimated 100,000 people saw the fireball, according to Mr Moore.
He said there was an excellent chance the rock had landed in Co Donegal, but that it would be very hard to pinpoint it.
“If contact us and tell us where they saw it, we will be able to triangulate their positions and find it within a couple of days.”
Prof Bailey said it was “highly unlikely anything fell to land, and if it did, it is unlikely anything would be found”.
He said the fireball “probably didn’t produce a meteorite”, and if it did, the size “would be very small – less than a small stone”.
However, Mr Moore said it was “a rough rule of thumb that where a fireball is reported to be brighter than the moon, it is likely a meteorite dropped”. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 05-05-2010 23:59 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Arizonans Find Largest Meteorite Fragment From Spectacular Midwestern Fall
http://www.physorg.com/news192272863.html
May 5th, 2010 in Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Arizonans Find Largest Meteorite Fragment From Spectacular Midwestern Fall
Enlarge
Wisconsin meteorite. (Photo by Kitty Killgore)
(PhysOrg.com) -- UA meteorite curator Marvin Killgore has found what is to date the largest fragment of an object that exploded in the skies over Wisconsin in April.
People in southwestern Wisconsin and northern Iowa on April 14 witnessed a sonic boom and a fireball that briefly - and spectacularly - lit up the late evening sky. It was the result of an ancient rock that ended its 4.5 billion year journey through the solar system in a ball of flames entering Earth's atmosphere.
NASA officials estimated that the rock, a meteoroid some 3.3 feet across, blew apart with the force equivalent to 20 tons of TNT. Videos of it are widely available on the Internet.
And it also set off what one meteorite hunter called "the ultimate Easter egg hunt."
Marvin Killgore, the curator of meteorites for the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, and his wife, Kitty, were among the first of a phalanx of meteorite hunters from around the world to arrive in Mineral Point, Wisc., just days after the sighting.
To date, the Killgores have what may be the largest fragment of the meteorite, a pristine chunk of space rock weighing about 300 grams, although Marvin Killgore said rumors of a larger meteorite are circulating.
The Killgores work with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Marc Fries on locating meteorites. They use Doppler weather radar sites on the Internet to triangulate the trajectory of objects heading through the atmosphere to the ground. Much like atmospheric clouds, exploding meteoroids create clouds of debris that are picked up as radar signatures and form a "strewn field," the zone that encompasses the area where pieces of the meteorite land.
This particular object was a breccia, a conglomerate of rocks embedded in a fine-grained rock matrix. It most likely came from the asteroid belt orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.
Killgore estimated the rock first detonated at 30 kilometers - about 18 miles above the Earth's surface - with the first radar signature occurring at about 30,000 feet, sending a two-mile wide,14-mile-long shower of fragments into the Wisconsin countryside.
The Killgores, along with their daughter and son-in-law, Laura and Nick Center, drove straight through from Arizona to Wisconsin almost as soon as they heard about it.
They were not alone. Marvin Killgore said there were about 100 other meteorite hunters in Mineral Point the day they arrived, combing through the freshly plowed fields, grass-lined fences and roadways for a prize.
Mineral Point, a farm community midway between Madison and Dubuque, Iowa, had become Ground Zero for the meteorite fall.
"The pieces can fall anywhere," Killgore said. "It's basically like tossing a handful of gravel into the grass and then see if you can find them."
Arizonans Find Largest Meteorite Fragment From Spectacular Midwestern Fall
Enlarge
Wisconsin meteorite, showing the interior structure.
Finding them generally involves a lot of walking.
"We have a metal detector, but there is so much metallic farm debris in the fields from tractors and other equipment that we just use our eyes and magnets," said Kitty Killgore. The magnets are attached to walking sticks that aid in finding meteorites made of iron or are high in iron content.
The Killgores found their meteorite on a road near a local candle factory. It had split into three pieces on impact, stamped with an impression from the gravel on the road where it hit.
A sample from the meteorite found by a local farmer was sent to the University of Wisconsin and found to contain traces of magnesium, iron and silica compounds, as well as other common minerals like olivine and pyroxene. It also contained iron-nickel metal and iron sulfide, minerals typically found in primitive meteorites discovered on Earth.
Some meteorites are valuable enough to fetch several thousand dollars on the market - part of the reason, Killgore said, why the number of meteorite hunters has grown dramatically in recent years as technology has made them easier to find.
Easier but with no guarantees. He said many people will spend one or two thousand dollars and a couple of weeks at a site and come away empty-handed. A few will spend upwards of $50,000 at a potentially rich site with hopes of recouping their expenses and making a profit.
Marvin and Kitty Killgore themselves have amassed one of the largest collections of meteorites in the world, more than six tons. The largest weighs nearly 1,600 pounds.
Selling a fraction of the collection could let them live comfortably. Their goal instead is to keep the collection intact and in Arizona to be used for scientific investigation. That will include some public exhibits as well.
One is scheduled for June 12-13 at the Foothills Mall in Tucson. The Wisconsin meteorite will be on display along with some major iron and stony-iron pieces.
Marvin Killgore said there most likely are larger fragments from the Wisconsin meteor than the one he found, and pieces of it will show up for years to come. But over time those fragments will have weathered, he said.
"This one is relatively pristine, handled by very few human hands," he said. "And it hasn't been on Earth all that long. It's exciting to be the first one to see something like this, to pick it up and hold it in your hand, and to know that it just came from somewhere away from here. It's pretty awsome."
Provided by University of Arizona |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21362 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 27-09-2010 08:31 Post subject: |
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Meteor crater found on Google Earth could help prepare for future impacts
A meteor crater that scientists believe could help prepare for future impacts has been discovered on Google Earth.
Published: 7:00AM BST 27 Sep 2010
The Kamil crater, which is 16 metres deep and 45 metres wide, is deep within the Egyptian desert, and was unknown until it was found using the search engine's satellite images.
Caused by a ten ton mass of iron travelling at more than 12,000kph, it is one of the best preserved sites ever found.
The impact would have generated a fireball seen more than 1,000 kilometres away, and scientists believe it is relatively young – potentially less than a few thousand years old.
This means it is likely to have been seen by early humans.
The crater was spotted in the border region between Egypt, Sudan and Libya in 2008 by mineralogist Vincenzo De Michele, then with the Civico Museo di Storia Naturale in Milan, Italy.
He was searching for natural features when he chanced on the image on his PC screen.
He contacted astrophysicist Dr Mario Di Martino, at the INAF (National Institute for Astrophysics) observatory in Turin, who, along with Dr Luigi Folco, organised an expedition to the site in February this year.
The two week expedition took more than a year to plan, and involved 40 people driving for three days in 40 degree heat to find the site.
They collected fragments and carried out tests, and found that it was in remarkably pristine condition.
Dr Detlef Koschny said: "This demonstrates that metallic meteorites having a mass on the order of 10 tonnes do not break up in the atmosphere, and instead explode when they reach the ground and produce a crater,"
Dr Falco added: "We are still determining the geochronology of the impact site, but the crater is certainly less than ten thousand years old and potentially less than a few thousand.
"The impact may even have been observed by humans, and archaeological investigations at nearby ancient settlements may help fix the date,"
The European Space Agency, which helped fund the expedition, said: "The data gathered during the expedition will be very useful to ESA's Space Situational Awareness programme's activities for risk assessment of small asteroids with orbits that approach Earth, a category to which the Kamil impactor originally belonged."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8026237/Meteor-crater-found-on-Google-Earth-could-help-prepare-for-future-impacts.html |
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