Meteorite Strikes Indian Village 350
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.
Sending Aid (Score:5, Insightful)
At least after this mess is cleaned up, they will have something to tell the tourists. They can take solace in the fact that they aren't the new meteor crater.
Re:What's all this then? (Score:2, Insightful)
This meteorite in particular was probably 30cm wide or so, that's quite a lot, actually.
Re:Be thankful (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What's all this then? (Score:4, Insightful)
You thought wrong.
Nearly everything in low Earth orbit is tracked, because of the threat to satellites and manned spacecraft. But no organization has the resources set aside to track everything in the solar system.
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.
You really haven't been paying attention, have you?
The standard cliche is that the number of people looking for these things is smaller than the number of people working at your average McDonald's. You want these rocks found, you convince your government to spend the money to do it.
Firstly, it was an asteroid, not a "meter".
Secondly, we got swamped with that news because the media is stupid.
Re:What's all this then? (Score:4, Insightful)
Space is big. It's impossible to track everything bigger then a tennis ball. NASA does try to track some objects that are in orbit, but they NASA never claimed to be tracking "everything".
We've been swamped with news of some other meter which had like a 1^-1000000 chance to hit and this thing just charges in?
Don't confuse NASA with the Media coverage of NASA. NASA has reported other important finds which were not covered by the media. This one story was blown out of proportion.
The media thinks you're obsessed with the OJ Simpson trial, Ben & Jen, Laci Peterson, Princess Di, etc.
"This post was brought to you by 'McDonalds: Our Food tastes horrible and makes you fat, but it's cool!'
Re:What's all this then? (Score:2, Insightful)
I only hope the wake up call isn't also the big bad one
No major newspaper/news site in India mentions it (Score:3, Insightful)
The cnn article quotes its source as PTI (Press Trust of India) but their website itself (www.ptinews.com) doesn't mention any such thing...
Maybe the Indian media is in deep slumber
Good thing it landed in EAST India (Score:2, Insightful)
Pheeew!
Seriously though, those guys are really, really, really out of luck!!
Re:What's all this then? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hundreds!?!!? Oh my God!!! It's a good thing we don't have fires anymore, that earthquakes are completely predictable so no one ever dies in those. It's also good we can stop hurricanes off our shores, and 15,000 people don't die in heat waves [cnn.com] anymore. So, yeah, now is the time to really get to work on solving a problem that hasn't killed a single person in recorded history.
Terminology (Score:3, Insightful)
What's funny about it... (Score:1, Insightful)
But... this happened in india, so nobody cared...