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

Cassini Records Meteor Hits on Saturn's Rings

Cameras on the Cassini spacecraft recently recorded debris plumes caused by meteors impacting Saturn's rings.   Not a lot is known about the meteors other than speculation as to their size.  Estimates have suggested that they were far smaller, possibly as tiny as three feet across, than even those that crashed in rural Russia.  The damage however comes from the meteor's high velocity, somewhere in the order of ten miles a second.  

The first images were taken in '09 but were overlooked because of their minuscule size. If you look at the photos here,  you can see light colored streaks.  Even though they were tiny, the resulting dust plume,  at the brightest part is over 3000 miles long but only 125 miles wide, which made it difficult to detect at certain angles. 

You can read more of the article here on IO9

BMU Podcast # 353 Now Online

Welcome to episode 353 of Beam Me Up.  This week, a change or two, some surprising happenings and I continue with Doug Turnbull's story.

First off an excellent new piece of music called 7 Rounds from John Anealio.  FYI  you can follow John and catch other tracks on John's blog http://scifisongs.blogspot.com/

As a change up, instead of asking questions as trivia for star trek, I think each week, I will come up with a couple of Star Trek trivia facts.  You are always welcome to weigh in on either trivia questions or facts.

From there I have a couple of Earth Sky news stories. 

Earth Sky reports on a possible new dwarf planet more than 600 million miles past Pluto. 

Kallamis  Gives us a weekly run down of news.

And I continue on with the Beam Me Up blog, more on the Russian Meteor strike, The Goldilocks Zone has been modified, discovery of the youngest black hole in our galaxy? Kallamis again is on a tirade about Pluto and it's new moon....and new equipment for the blind.

I finish with part 2 of Colonial Scout by Doug Turbull.

Podcast

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!

What do Meteors look like from Above?

Here is a photograph that is a once in a life time occurrence. From an article I read on Kim Komando's blog entry. Here, Astronaut Ron Garan aboard the International Space Station, shows us what a meteor looks like from space." Garan, captured this unique photograph during the Perseid meteor shower in August.

click the article title for an enlarged photo.

Georgia Experiences Brightest Meteor Yet Recorded by NASA

Tim Sayell just sent me a note about a meteor that brightened Georgian sky May 20th.

What was so exciting about this meteor you ask? Well a couple of things really stand out, how big it was and how bright. First off was it's size. Not huge but not diminutive either. NASA estimates that the space rock was 6-foot-wide. And what really drew interest was how bright the meteor was.

From the Yahoo News article:

• It was the brightest meteor yet recorded by NASA's fireball-observing network — based at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
• When it entered the atmosphere, the comet chunk was traveling northwest at about 86,000 mph. At this velocity, the boulder-size "dirty snowball" possessed an energy or striking power somewhere between 500 and 1,000 tons of TNT.

complete Yahoo News article here

Proof that Panspermia Happened?

From the pages of yahoo news, Tim Sayell sends in an intriguing article.

In a meteorite discovered in the Sudan, scientists have found something that by all rights should not exist. Scientists have discovered amino acids, the very building blocks of life. Finding them on a meteorite seems to indicate that, far from an isolated occurrence, building amino acids and possibly the proteins that are built from these simple structures, are likely much more common and much easier to synthesize in space.

According to the Yahoo article:

• (previously) scientists found amino acids in samples of Comet Wild 2, and in various carbon-rich meteorites. Finding amino acids in these objects supports the theory that the origin of life got a boost from space.

Read the complete fascinating Yahoo article here

Did the Chicxulub impactor have a BIG brother?

It is a fairly universal fact that the impactor 65 million years ago that happened off the coast of Mexico at Chicxulub played the death knell for many plant and animal species, including the dinosaurs. However there are still that remaining nagging few who say that the Chicxulub object could not have done such a devastating job all on its' own. They point to the Deccan Traps area that underwent bouts of volcanic activity between 68 and 64 million years ago. The thought is that this activity would have blocked so much of the sun's energy that most plants would have died and along with it the animals that depended on the as well.

There is however a problem. Such a large area of volcanic activity usually is attached to a tectonic plate's rim. Not so in this case. It was one of the odd hot-spot breakouts like Yellowstone or the Hawaiian island chain. But again there is a problem. These hot-spots are relatively speaking fairly small. The Deccan Traps covers a staggering 500,000 square kilometers! Weirder still, lava that makes up the Deccan Traps is high in iridium, not common in the Earth's crust but very common in yep, you guessed it.... meteorites. And such a meteorite! If the measurements are even close, we may find that the Earth was struck, at about the same time as Chicxulub, by an unbelievably huge 30km impactor!

I am only taking a small part of the really fascinating article in IO9. It reads like the best mystery novel. Check it out HERE