Meteorite Strikes Indian Village

PS writes "The BBC is reporting that a village in eastern India was struck by a meteorite Saturday evening, wrecking several houses and injuring about twenty people. Fortunately, no one appears to have been killed by the impact or subsequent fires. CNN suggests that a second village near the impact site may have also been struck by part of the meteorite." Human/meteorite encounters are not entirely unheard of.

its not western India

[Cowboy Bill]

Its eastern India. Please Read article first. The article also goes on to say that the only living creature to be harmed by a meteor in recorded history was an Egyptian Dog which had the misfortune to be at the wrong place at the wrong time :-) . This happened in 1911 BTW.

Western India. Doh!

[jpu8086]

BBC: "At least 20 people are reported to have been injured after a meteorite crashed to Earth in eastern India."

Brief summary after the headline.

It's eastern India. not western India. Does any one verify any stories over here?

Be thankful

[Kethinov]

A meteorite of not much larger mass could have caused far more widespread destruction. I could be off on my facts here, but I remember reading about a similar event taking place in Russia, devastating several many acres of open forest. Should it have impacted a city, the city would have been leveled. Granted we're all familiar with the meteorite impact apocalypse prospect, all I'm saying is it could be worse. I wonder how many other life forms or even civilizations have evolved on other planets that were completely obliterated because of stellar impacts. Something to fear.

Happened in New Orleans last week

[sinjayde]

I read in the local paper [spokesmanreview.com] (link about half way down - reg required) that the same thing also happened in New Orleans this week. The meteorite, which looked like a snady colored rock containing minerals commonly found in meteorites (tested at Tulane University) punched a hole through Ray Fausset's roof and two floors before coming to rest in the crawl space beneath the house, as reported.

Re:Sending Aid

[ghostlibrary]

Actually, if they just gather the pieces of the meteorite and sell it, they'll have all the aid they need. An observed fall will sell for at least a dollar a gram, likely more.

Market it as "noticed fall, [date fell] [location]", it's a couple of bucks a gram to people who like to collect meteorites.

Market it as "chips of the man-slaying meteorite", and you could probably multiply that price by ten and sell it via Home Shopping Network. Ugh.

Orissa gets it again

[jpetts]

This comes just a couple of years after the flood in Orissa [bbc.co.uk]. Wonder what the Orissans have done to piss off Jesus/Allah/Krishna so much?

Re:What's all this then?

[vondo]

They track small stuff like that in orbit where it endangers spacecraft.

There is NO way currently to track all the stuff that size in the solar system.

Re:What's all this then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, NASA does not track everything larger than a tennis ball. The U.S. space command (part of the air force) tracks most things larger than a tennis ball in low Earth orbit . If this came from interplanetary space there is almost no chance to see it. There are search programs going on, but right now they cover only the northern hemisphere, and with a size down to about 100 meters in diameter. The Australian government recently slashed funding for the only southern-hemisphere search.

So in fact, it is quite possible that a dinosaur-killer could hit New York tomorrow and wipe us all out, and we would have NO warning. Thank your government for their lack of foresight for that.

Re:Finally

[Guppy06]

IIRC, Deep Impact had one chunk of comet hitting the Atlantic, and the second chunk aiming for Canada.

Cold war hair trigger?

[chrestomanci]

A meteorite of not much larger mass could have caused far more widespread destruction. I could be off on my facts here, but I remember reading about a similar event taking place in Russia, devastating several many acres of open forest. Should it have impacted a city, the city would have been leveled.

Perhaps even scarier, is if this meteorite had been as big as the Tunguska [earthsci.org] event, it would probably have been mistaken for a nuclear explosion.

With the ongoing cold war between India and Pakistan, the Indian military might well have shot first, and asked questions later, causing a small nuclear war, and a much greater loss of life than the initial meteorite.

Numbers, Threats, Reality

[fm6]

If you want to try finding every rock the size of a beach ball in the entire volume of the solar system, be my guest.

Some numbers might be helpful. The official NASA estimate for asteroids 300 feet or bigger is 160,000. About 1,000 of these exceed 2 miles in diameter. That doesn't count comets, which zap in and out of the inner system, and thus are basically invisible most of the time. Nor does it count smaller objects. I couldn't find figures for these, but it must be in the millions.

There's actually not much point in trying to track all these objects. A lot of them are in eccentric orbits (like comets) and thus untrackable most of the time. The rest are no threat because they're in regular orbits that don't interesect ours. The ones that were in intersection orbits got swept up a very long time ago -- that's how planets are formed. The danger comes when these orbits change, after being disturbed by interaction with another object. So if we every get serious about looking out for killer asteroids, we won't try to track every one we already know about -- we'll just keep a general watch for new objects or old objects in new orbits.

Also, really small objects are no threat, because they burn up in the atmosphere. Objects big enough to punch through do hit pretty often, but I've never heard of anybody getting hurt by one. Which I guess indicates that we're not as big a planetary feature as we like to think, and also explains why there's such a short memory for these events. As indicated by the attention the Indian impacts are getting.

More common is damage to buildings and machinery. Speaking of which, if you find that your car has had a hole punched in it by something falling from the sky, do not get it repaired until you've determined the cause -- here are collectors who pay good money for cars with meteorite damage. But don't plan your retirement before you've made sure it's not just blue ice [santacruzsentinel.com].

Secondly, we got swamped with that news because the media is stupid.

Not quite fair. It's not the media's fault that most people know jack about astronomy, and can't distinguish a harmless rock from a killer asteroid. Which is pretty important. Armageddon-style planet killers are rarer than intelligent Hollywood movies, but some scientists think that rocks big enough to wipe out a city happen every 100 years. And in fact, it's been almost that long since the Tunguska event. Which, alas, most people know about mainly from watching The X Files.

Re:I wonder...

[kbonin]

Post has been up long enough, slow topic, we'll see...
First [vscape.com] is on desk, thats normal sized pen in front.
This is [vscape.com] closeup of surface detail... Sorry for small pic size, these were taken w/ PDA...

Re:Cold war hair trigger?

[metlin]

With the ongoing cold war between India and Pakistan, the Indian military might well have shot first, and asked questions later, causing a small nuclear war, and a much greater loss of life than the initial meteorite.


Actually, it wouldn't have been that easy. As of January 2003, India has a formal nuclear command structure under civilian control [mediamonitors.net], with a Nuclear Command Authority comprising of a Political Council (chaired by the Prime Minister and an environmental board) and an Executive council (chaired by the National Security Advisor and a scientific board). The advisory committee would comprise of the Commander-in-Chief of Strategic Forces Command.

So IMHO, its not that easy to launch a deterrent without validating the origin of the said event :) Do rememeber that despite the tension in the region, India is a largely peaceful democracy.

Re:Something seems wrong with this report

[grozzie2]

If you have a baseball-sized meteorite of density 3.2 g/cc, using a value of 1.2 kg/m^3 for the density of air, you will find that the meteorite will slow from its approach velocity of roughly 11000 meters per second to its terminal velocity of 60 m/s in a mere 28 seconds, having traveled only 3 km.

The first problem with your math, you are assuming the meteor hits air at 1.2 kg/m^3. that's the density of air at sea level, not the density at the upper levels of the atmosphere. The real factor that matters is the angle of penetration. If the meteor is travelling at 11,000 m/s as you say, and hits the atmosphere vertically, it will encounter thin air initially. At an altitude of 6000 m, the density is already half that of sea level.

It's far to late in the evening to drag out serious mathematics, but, suffice it to say, if the meteor size of a baseball has a vertical penetration of the atmosphere at 11,000 m/s, it's likely gonna be still travelling well above the atmospheric terminal velocity at impact. The atmospheric drag will not have caused it to shed all that velocity in the minute or so it'll take to reach impact, assuming of course it's got enough mass and density to not have melted completely due to heat from friction.

If the angle of penetration is shallow, then yes, it'll spend a significant time in the upper atmosphere, and it'll likely be travelling at/near the terminal velocity induced by the sum of atmospheric drag, and 9.8 m/s^2 vertical acceleration applied by the mass of the earth. Essentially nothing more than a rock falling out of the sky.

Re:A meteorite from Mars???

[BenjyD]

Meteorite impacts on Mars throw rocks from the surface upwards at greater than Martian escape velocity. The rocks then sail through space for a few million years before some of them bump into Earth.