Meteorite Slams Into Nicaragua or Did it?

Asteroid 2014 RC recently passed by one-tenth of the distance from Earth to the moon may have left a "surprise"earlier this week.  This present was in the shape of a meteorite that "caused an explosion and earth tremor, leaving a crater 39ft across and 16 ft deep in Nicaragua near the city's airport." 

Asteroid 2014 RC,  is expected to orbit near Earth again. 

Original article originated on Boing Boing  HERE

Strangeness abounds however.  NASA doubts that the blast and resulting crater were caused by 2014 RC.

The blast occurred better than 12 hours after the asteroid had made its pass, plus the nearness of this asteroid's pass, precludes impacts from meteorites.   

NASA's Doubts can be found in the National Geographic site  HERE

Was the Moon Created by a Giant Collision? German Scientists Say Most Deff

 

Most theories about the formation of the Moon use a "Huge Impact" a a probable cause for the Moon's creation.  Problem? Oh yes, analysis of samples from the moon show that they are identical with those of Earth's.  No third planet material is detected in either samples, which is a major setback to proving said theory.  

Now a German team has re-examined the moon rock samples and discovered a measurable difference in the ratio of Oxygen isotopes with the samples having a slightly higher concentration of Oxygen 17 than Earth rock does, which the researchers claim is evidence that a rogue planet played a part in the formation of the moon.

Of course not everyone is sold.  Critics of the updated huge impactor suggest that they would    expect a more radical difference in chemical compositions between Earth and the theoretical huge asteroid.  The German team also had only a small sample set to work with, but the lead researcher is pretty convinced: "This confirms the giant impact hypothesis."

Halley Harbinger of Doom!

Can you wrap your head around it?  Halley's comet as the bringer of famine and death!? So it would seem.  

A recent LiveScience article suggests that the famine of 536A.D.  may have been brought about by a massive impact from a fragment of none other than the famous comet.    The climate changes brought on by the kicked up debris devastated crops and as such many people starved and sickened.  

In these weakened conditions, many people became susceptible to "Justinian's plague" in 541-542 A.D.  to go on later to be know as Europe's The Black Death!  

From the LiveScience article:

• The new results come from an analysis of Greenland ice that was laid down between A.D. 533 and 540. The ice cores record large amounts of atmospheric dust during this seven-year period, not all of it originating on Earth.

 Of course there is only circumstantial evidence to suggest that a fragment was present to do this level of damage.  But to do the type of damage it is suggested that  the fragment measuring about 2000 feet wide disintegrated high up in the atmosphere spreading enough dust around the globe to cause the wide spread famines that history records.  

Check out the LiveScience blog entry HERE 

Thanks to Xnewsman for the heads up

Do We Have to Worry About Chelyabinsk Class Impacts?

 

Check the photo.  It is a photo of a hole punched through the ice of Lake Chebarkul, southwest of Chelyabinsk.  This impact, according to the New York Times,  shattering windows for miles and injuring well over 1,000 people.   

Now experts classified this as a rare event — happening maybe once every 100 to 200 years, on average.  But now  scientists suggest that the Earth could be hit with Chelyabinsk-size  rocks than was previously thought, possibly  occurring  as often as every decade or two. 

Check out the complete New York Times article HERE

Over 1000 Injured in Meteor Blast!

• Over 1000 people were hurt when a meteor slammed into a remote Russian village.
• 
  
•  According to NASA the small asteroid released the equivalent to 300,000 tons of TNT, the space agency's officials said Friday, adding that the incident was a once-in-100-years event.  
• 
  
• A large portion of the injuries were caused by flying glass and other debris, resulting from the powerful shock wave.  Most of those hurt, including at last count, over 200 children,  are in the Chelyabinsk region.  Apx. 3000 building were damaged.  
• 
  
• From the CNN article:

• Vladimir Stepanov, of the National Center for Emergency Situations at the Russian Interior Ministry, earlier told state media that hospitals, kindergartens and schools were among those affected.
• 
  
• The national space agency, Roscosmos, said scientists believed one meteoroid had entered the atmosphere, where it burned and disintegrated into fragments.  The resulting meteorites are believed to be scattered across three regions of Russia.

UPDATE
Kallamis just wrote to say that the stats have been changed

The meteors size is now thought to have been 55' wide, and sent off a blast of 500 kiloton.

That's more like 3 city buses or couple of train cars now.  And 500 kiloton?!! damn!

ESA to Attempt Deflection of NEO

ESA's AIM

No question about it, we have been fixated as of late on the off chance that some rogue asteroid might be on a collision course with the Earth and humanity is doomed.

I am not going to say that it can't happen just that it is damn unlikely.  

So what does that have to do with the price of beans in China you ask?  In this article in ESA online, discusses a mission to take place in 2022 that would entail impacting a near Earth asteroid with a 600 or so pound space-craft, moving at 14,000 mph, then seeing if there was any measurable change in trajectory.  

The asteroid in question is a 2600 ft. binary asteroid called 65803 Didymos and all though it is not a huge asteroid, by comparison the Tunguska object was only most likely 1/10 as large.   Didymos' binary is a apx. 500 foot object orbiting about 1/2 mile out and that will be the target of the ESA's experiment.  

The mission will be called A.I.D.A. for asteroid impact & deflection assessment, and will consist of two craft - DART for double asteroid redirection test and AIM - asteroid impact monitor.  The impactor will be the DART and AIM will record the data. 

If this all sounds a bit familiar, recall the NASA   Deep Impact mission which launched an impactor into the path of the asteroid Temple 1.    Here is one of the films recorded.

Here is the Dvice article

and the ESA article

Moon Creating Impactor May Still Be Around?!

Huh? Are they serious?! The planet that ripped Earth a new one so bad that the leftover orbits us every 29 days or so, may still be hiding out to finish the job?! That's what I said when I read this in a Dvice article. It would seem that:

• the rogue planet was not actually destroyed in the impact, and we don't know where it went.

This according to new models. But the odds of this happening are very very low and truth be told that the best time for this to have happened would have been 4.5 billion years ago. Now the truly astute among us are saying, hey wait, that was when it hit us the first time and you would be right! The odds have steadily dropped since that first cataclysmic impact.

The worrisome part of all this speculation is that, studying the competition of the Earth and the Moon seems to indicate that very little of impactor's mass was exchanged and it may have continued on it's orbit with little loss of mass.

Well, like this article suggest though is that it is a "bit" on the fringe, and a fair piece from the standard model. Lots more evidence will have to come to light before it looses it's "crackpot" status....but still...something does not add up and remember it's what you DON'T know that will git ya!

The graphic shows A new model showing a Mars-sized planet impacting Earth to form the Moon and then escaping.

Oldest Impact Crater Discovered

Unlike the airless bodies in the Solar System, The Earth as a general example shows evidence of the massive and violent bombardment several billion years ago. Finding any evidence of ancient bombardment is more a scientific version of poke and hope. Continental drift plus the effects of rain, wind, plus the effects of the seasonal weather erase many of the structures that identify an impact crater.
From the article:

• Now, an international team of scientists say they have found a massive impact crater in Greenland a billion years older than other known asteroid impact on Earth.

The crater is located in the Maniitsoq region of West Greenland and is roughly one billion years older that the next oldest crater. What is truly amazing though is the huge diameter of the Greenland impact which measures a stunning 62 miles across!

Craters of the age of the Greenland impact have been all but obliterated, however the crust around Greenland:

• has been eroded over the eons to expose crust that originally was 16 miles below the surface. Effects of the immense shock-wave produced on impact penetrated deep into the crust and remain visible.

read the complete article here

Nuking Killer Asteroid Probably Wouldn't Work

Blowing up an Earth killer asteroid with an nuclear weapon has been a mainstay of written and movie science fiction. It has fallen out of favor over the past few years because it was thought that even though the body was broken into parts, they would continue along the same trajectory and impact the Earth like a shot-gun blast instead of a bullet.

But according to an article in New Scientist, unless the nuke was sufficiently large there might be another reason that this method probably wouldn't work.

It seems that if the constituents are not accelerated apart at a high enough velocity, the pieces start to coalesce in as little as 2 hours, therefor the net impact effect would be almost identical.

The good news is that if the bomb is of sufficient yield and the asteroid relatively small, the blast would permanently disperse the asteroid's parts.

Scientist have simulated blowing up 1 kilometer asteroids and found that a bomb of 900kilo-tons yield would be sufficient. The good news is that 900 kilo-ton is a doable size however even simple math shows that even a modest increase in asteroid size requires a geometric increase in the size of the explosive device.

NewScientist via Gizmodo

Russians considering rocket to move asteroid off course!

Recently, in a move that has left other space capable countries a bit bemused, Russia is considering sending a space-craft to the Apophis asteroid in hopes of changing its' course and preventing a collision with Earth, a collision that NASA has deemed highly unlikely.

Apophis is an 885-foot asteroid that was first discovered in 2004. Astronomers at one point thought the chances of hitting Earth on one of its' flybys as low as 1 in 37, however the lowest estimate of a collision is now set at 1 in 45,000 for the 2036 pass. What is a bit disconcerting about the 2036 estimate is that it was once 1 in 250,000, so the chances are much higher in 2036 even though they are still stacked well against the asteroid striking Earth even then.

The head of Russia's space agency, Anatoly Perminov disagrees with NASSA's assessment saying, that he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet.

From the article:

• Perminov wouldn't disclose any details of the project, saying they still need to be worked out. But he said the mission wouldn't require any nuclear explosions.

complete Yahoo News article

No Cheese, but there IS H2O on Luna!

CNN reports that NASA's LCROSS has indeed turned up water on the moon! Preliminary data collected from the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite's October 9th impact, indicates a significant amount of water in the plume thrown up by the impactor.

Project scientist Anthony Colaprete, stated that the amount of water contained in the impact plume was about a dozen, two-gallon bucketfuls. This could be significantly good news for any future long term facilities to be self sufficient - when it comes to fuel and water, two of the most expensive commodities to transport from Earth to orbit and to the Moon.

CNN article

Impactor plume photographed!

Shaun Saunder sends in an article from Newscientist that show the first image, taken by the trailing spacecraft, of lunar material kicked up by the impact of NASA's LCROSS mission.

Initially it was hoped that the impactor would kick up a plum that could be seen by telescopes on Earth. No plume was visible to Earth based scopes or even Hubble. Ejecta from the impact would have had to rise better than a half mile above the surface for it to be visible but most of the material stayed well below that altitude. Luckily the LCROSS craft was flying right behind the imactor stage. As such the ejecta had only to rise half as high.

Of course there was some bad communication as well. From the article:

• ...mission members said they expected the plume to reach no higher than about 10 km. But projectile experiments carried out on Earth weeks before the impact suggested the plume might reach far lower altitudes.

What possibly may not have been taken into account initially was that the impactor was hollow giving it a very of very low density. Therefor far less energy than expected was transfered to the site. A large portion of that energy was transferred back into the impactor , crumpling it. (as the article puts it, much like the crumple zones in today's cars)

America - distroyed by a comet?!

Now here is an interesting article. It seems, that North America has been destroyed by a comet strike taking all life with it. Not in the past though...well not in the distant past, but a short 13000 years ago.

This article from IO9 describes newly uncovered evidence that supports earlier research that suggested that the Clovis people, who went extinct nearly 13,000 years ago — and the disappearance of the pygmy mammoth may in fact have been victims of a large impact event. That research in 2007 suggested that the impact set off huge continental fires that brought about the disappearance of the Clovis people, but also the extermination of 35 mammal genera, including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and camels.

Read complete article at IO9 here

Amateur Astronomer Spots Asteroid Hit on Jupiter

Something extremely large slammed into Jupiter on July 19th. The impact, which was the size of the Earth, was discovered by amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, a 44 year old computer programmer in Murrumbateman, north of Canberra in Australia, using his 14.5 inch reflecting telescope.

NASA's JPL has confirmed the discovery which will only remain visible for a few more days.

The discovery of the impact was extremely lucky. Lucky in that someone had to be looking at the right time, right hour and have the right side facing toward us.

Needless to say the find has stunned the astronomy world since this was actually the first impact seen by astronomers since a comet collided with Jupiter in July of 94.

The bright white dot in the lower left of the photo is the object's impact

Complete story from Yahoo news submitted by Tim Sayell

Negative Gravity Ring on the Dark Side of the Moon

No it's not a Pink Floyd remix but a detailed study by the Japanese SELENE mission probing the far side of the moon. Now before you get all wigged out about antigravity on the moon "negative anomaly" simply means that there's less gravity than average.

From the article:

• It seems that the two sides of the moon have evolved differently since their formation, with the far side forming at cooler temperatures and remaining stiffer while the Earth side has been modified at higher temperatures and for longer. This information is extremely important for theories on the formation of the moon, of which the current favorite is the "Giant Impact" hypothesis.
• The Giant Impact idea is that four and a half billion years ago a planet the size of Mars rammed Earth, kicking enough debris into orbit to accrete into an entirely new body.
  

More info in the DailyGalaxy blog article

Tunguska explosion mystery solved by 3-d super computer

The 1908 Tunguska explosion that occurred in Siberia was the largest impact event in recent history. The real surprise though is the asteroid that caused the event may have been only a fraction as large as previously published estimates - this according to Sandia National Laboratories researchers.

The point that researchers want to point out is that even though the Tunguska asteroid was far smaller than originally estimated. The resulting explosion was 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Further, the chances of impacts from smaller bodies is far greater than those of larger ones. With this in mind, efforts should be redoubled to track the smaller asteroid bodies. Now that impact characteristics are more clearly understood, and the resulting explosions can be much greater than previously understood.

<- read more of the Daily Galaxy article on the Tunguska event ->

An asteroid twofer.....

Ever notice that every now and then all you see is one type of science article? Seems every time I look there is something about asteroids. One I found interesting in Discovery News talks about a possible asteroid impact some 2300 years ago off New York City. Studies of the Hudson river silt suggest an asteroid 330 feet in diameter slammed into the Atlantic Ocean nearby. The evidence of the impact takes the form of carbon spherules -- perfectly round particles that form in the extreme pressures of an impact. These particles were discovered by a team of researchers from Harvard.
Read more in Discovery News There is also a really neat animation showing how the proposed wave would have washed inland carrying with it proof if the impact.

The other article, sent in by Shaun Saunders, deals with Mars' lack of a magnetic field. Up until 5 billion years ago, Mars closely resembled Earth. Roughly 4.2 billion years ago Mars was suddenly pummeled with at least 20 asteroids between 124 and 311 miles in diameter, each leaving a crater. By contrast, the object thought to have killed of the dinosaurs on Earth is estimated to have been five to six miles wide. One of the last giant meteors blew a hole 1,864 miles wide in the planet, creating Utopia basin in the planet's northern hemisphere. At about 4.1 billion years old, Utopia is the oldest crust on the planet that doesn't show signs of magnetism, meaning the rocks must have cooled at a time when there was no magnetic field.
Read the MSNBC article that describes the dynamics taking place that would shut down Mars' magnetic field, which ultimately destroyed the planet's ability to maintain an atmosphere.

Aussie has answer to save Earth from asteroid attack - Plastic Wrap

In all seriousness, a PhD student with the University of Queensland's School of Engineering has won top prize in an international competition for a very unusual idea for protecting the Earth from collisions with asteroids. The plan would require wrapping an asteroid with reflective sheeting. The proposal involves using enhanced solar radiation pressure to move the threatening asteroid off course by wrapping it with reflective Mylar film. This is the same material that is already used on satellites to control temperatures. The film would be in the shape of miles long ribbons that would be carried to the asteroid by a satellite. The asteroid's own revolutions would be utilized to take up the film carried by the satellite, with the aim of covering about half of the body. This would change the characteristics of the asteroid enough to push it by solar pressure to a different orbit.
<- complete The Register article ->
submitted by Shaun A. Saunders

Exploding Asteroid May Have Killed Off Mammoth & Humans!

13 thousand years ago may have been a very bad time for North American Mammoth and early human inhabitants of the north American continent. Geological evidence found in Ohio and Indiana recently is strengthening the case suggesting that a phase of extinction for animals and humans at the end of the last Ice Age was a cataclysmic comet or asteroid explosion over top of Canada. The theory puts forth that an object exploded just above the earth’s surface over Canada, producing a massive shock wave and a super-heated wave that set large parts of the northern hemisphere ablaze. Some of the most telling evidence is samples of diamonds, gold and silver found in sites in Ohio and Indiana are from deposits in Canada. The only plausible scenario for explaining their presence this far south- researches say - is this type of cataclysmic explosive event.

<more in ScienceDaily>

Non Profit to study "gravity tractor"

Michael Reilly writing in IO9 writes a pretty scathing criticism of NASA's future plans as they concern NEOs and the possibility of impacts. As he writes: "While Griff and his Bush Administration cronies dust off their tie-dye shirts, smoke a bowl and try to relive NASA's Apollo golden years with their mission back to the Moon, it's good to know someone's paying attention to the Asteroid threat. " Who is the "someone" he mentions? That's Rusty Schweickart who is heading up the B612 Foundation. The non-profit is kicking $50,000 to a group of experts at Jet Propulsion Labs to study the "gravity tractor" method of deflecting Earth crossing objects or more accurately objects that are about to hit Earth.


The gravity tractor method is brilliant in its simplicity. Blowing up these objects is not an option. The only thing you change with that method is the difference of getting hit with a rifle bullet or a shotgun blast. Other methods rely on mounting engines on the objects. But this requires that you balance the engines exactly or fire the engines only when they are aligned properly. Also there are the size of the engines to consider. With our rocket tech at present, it would be like an ant pushing the QE2. So what makes the Gravity Tractor so attractive? Well in space you don't have to overcome friction only enertia. Also, no matter how big the mass differential, one mass will always atract another. So this is where the brilliant part kicks in. The idea is to build a fairly massive space craft. It could be build out of Lunar material or other small asteroids or whatever. It doesn't have to be unrealisticly huge, just as big as possible. The idea is to park this craft close to an incoming object. The masses will attract and what the tractor does is to keep the object at a constant distance with rockets or whatever. Its not mounted to the object at all. So the asteroid is allowed to spin and do whatever, but its never allowed to touch the tractor. Ever so slowly its pulled off its trajectory that would impact Earth. The real trick is that it has to be done early in its orbit. Because the attraction forces are light, it will take time to move the really massive objects. But once detected, setting the tractor up is the "easy" part.



<LiveScience.com via IO9>

Image: B612 Foundation