Asteroid the 'Size of a Minivan' Exploded Over California 279
astroengine writes, quoting Discovery: "The source of loud 'booms' accompanied by a bright object traveling through the skies of Nevada and California on Sunday morning has been confirmed: it was a meteor. A big one. It is thought to have been a small asteroid that slammed into the atmosphere at a speed of 15 kilometers per second (33,500 mph), turning into a fireball, delivering an energy of 3.8 kilotons of TNT as it broke up over California's Sierra Nevada mountains. Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, classified it as a 'big event.' 'I am not saying there was a 3.8 kiloton explosion on the ground in California,' Cooke told Spaceweather.com. 'I am saying that the meteor possessed this amount of energy before it broke apart in the atmosphere. (The map) shows the location of the atmospheric breakup, not impact with the ground.' Interestingly, this event was bigger than asteroid 2008 TC3 that exploded over the skies of Sudan in 2008 after being detected before it hit."
SI unit (Score:5, Informative)
Picture! (Score:5, Informative)
http://ktvn.images.worldnow.com/images/17652544_BG1.jpg [worldnow.com]
Re:Picture! (Score:4, Informative)
Source: http://www.ktvn.com/story/17652544/update-large-boom-heard-around-region-sunday [ktvn.com]
Re:Actually, I would (Score:3, Informative)
Inconstant moon.
Written in the day before cell phones and worldwide TV. The main character figured it out but most others were unaware. A much different scenario would happen nowadays. Maybe Lucifer's hammer is closer to what would happen.
Quick calculations (Score:5, Informative)
So for fun, I did some quick calculations. I'm not a physicist, but recalling the relationship between kinetic energy, mass, and velocity...
K = 3.8 kilotons TNT = 1.59*10^13 J = (1/2)mv^2
m = 2K/v^2 = 1.41*10^5 kg
So the mass was about 141,000 kg. According to a random source, the average minivan is about 17m^3 in size, so that would make the density of the object 8.3*10^3 kg/m^3, roughly equal to that of iron. So if my math is correct, this thing was basically the equivalent of a solid piece of iron the size of a minivan.