Meteorite Hunters Find the West Texas Fireball

An anonymous reader writes "A fireball streaked over Austin, Texas on February 15 producing sonic booms and startling people for hundreds of miles. The video of the event was shown on national television and viewed by thousands of people on the Net. The first news reports speculated that the fireball might have been debris from a February 13th collision between two satellites over Siberia but space experts said that the object was probably a meteor. Now this has been confirmed: experienced meteorite hunters located a strewnfield about 120 miles north of the filming site of the Austin cameraman and have recovered over 100 freshly fallen meteorites."

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

[Bordgious]

Astronomy nerd style!

Re:

[deglr6328]

as opposed to what? pole dancer style?

Debunked?

[gravos]

Debunked? http://www.wkyt.com/news/headlines/39627192.html [wkyt.com]

As for the "flashes" that were reported, Dr. Ciocca says there are some types of satellites that have reflective surfaces. These are called iridium satellites and they emit flashes in the sky when the sun's rays strike them at the right angle. He says many astronomy hobbyists even track those sorts of satellites.

Pure speculation...

[TapeCutter]

...but I wonder if it had anything to do with this [slashdot.org]. Perhaps the asteroid has passed this way before and was broken into smaller chunks by gravity. Would be interesting to see if someone could figure out the fireballs tragectory.

Re:

[TapeCutter]

Thanks, was a WTF moment for me as you can see by my other reply.

Re:

[beav007]

Posting to undo my accidental offtopic mod. Sorry.

People continue to deny that this is an issue, but it happens often enough that it clearly is. I have noticed that it especially becomes a problem when using trackpads.

CmdrTaco: Please can you fix this now? Please?

Re:

[chromas]

I am using a trackpad, but it was the arrow key this time, due to scrolling while the combobox was selected. There's a drawback to replacing the "Moderate!" button with javascript without having an Undo feature.

Re:

[TapeCutter]

"CmdrTaco: Please can you fix this now? Please?"

Looks like your subscription has expied, as had mine until just now...

Re:

[MyLongNickName]

I wish to heck I knew how the mod point system worked. I used to get them on a weekly basis. Haven't had any in over a year now.

Re:

[fprintf]

I get mod points all the time, to the point that they get really annoying. I don't know the formula but I think it is related to current karma (currently Excellent), recent posting activity and any resulting moderations, plus metamoderation activity.

Since the switch to the firehouse-like metamoderation I haven't done it lately. And yet I am still getting moderator points every week or so. Sometimes it is only 5 if I have been inactive or acting rather trollish, but most of the time it is 15. I have 9 unuse

Re:

[Muad'Dave]

My karma's excellent, I post regularly, and metamod. I was fair and didn't abuse the mod points when I had them. I haven't had mod points in over two years, and I'm not happy about it. What's the deal?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Meteorites fall all the time. Just because a 30-meter asteroid makes the news, it doesn't suddenly make it the origin of every meteorite.

Re:

[TapeCutter]

Thank you captain obvious [google.com.au]

Re:Pure speculation...

[Jane Q. Public]

If it had broken up before it entered the atmosphere, it would have been much more widely scattered. Very small aerodynamic effects around the rocks way up in the upper atmosphere would cause their entry trajectories to be very different... the individual rocks would likely have landed hundreds of miles apart, not clustered around a single farmer's field.

In other words, in such circumstances the Butterfly Effect has vastly more influence on small, irregular objects than it is on, say, a large, smooth, symmetrical, engineered re-entry vehicle.

Qualification

[Jane Q. Public]

of course it does depend on the size of the fragments... if they were large, the effect would be smaller.

Re:

[MrNaz]

The Butterfly Effect refers to chaos theory, which states that, at a macroscopic level, large changes can be brought about in a system by factors that are relatively very small. This is often illustrated by relating the flapping of a butterfly's wings on one side of the Earth to the follow on effects leading to a hurricane on the other side of the planet.

I don't think it was the parent that referred to the effect wrongly, but the initial post where it was used to explain that smaller objects would be affect

Re:

[Jane Q. Public]

I was the one referring to it, and I know what it means. Another way of putting it is "a situation, the outcome of which can vary widely and is very sensitive to initial conditions".

I brought it up to point out the fact that an irregular bunch of small rocks, even if they entered the upper atmosphere together, would be scattered very widely by the time they struck... if they were ever strike at all.

Re:Qualification

[TapeCutter]

Consider a 5 meter ball of steel hurtling toward the N pole. At the same altitude over the S pole is a single Iron atom hurtling toward Earth at the same speed. They will both hit the atmosphere at the same time without influencing each other.

The 5 meter ball will make a direct hit on Santa wiping out any Elves within a considerable radius.

The Iron atom on the other hand will start hiting single atoms/molecules. Suppose you could somehow freeze every atom in it's place before the Iron atom hit the atmosphere until it, hit the ground. (go away chemists).

If you have ever played pool you will understand how increadibly acurate that first contact the Iron atom makes would need to be to hit a five meter target on the ground.

Re:

[TapeCutter]

The chaos in my example relates to accuracy not the energy of the impact. WP is your friend search on - "chaos theory" and then look at "dynamic equilibrium" or alternativly take up pool playing. ;)

Re:

[TapeCutter]

Good points. Military Radar if (say) NASA asked politely?

Re:

[Tubal-Cain]

In a word: No
Objects in orbit don't really change direction in radically unpredictable ways.

Consider the asteroid 99942 Apophis [wikipedia.org]. There was some concern that it would hit Earth in 2029, but it has been determined that it will not. However, we also know that it will hit Earth in 2036 if (in 2029) it passes through a specific area a little under 2000 feet wide.

If we can calculate the probability of a specific asteroid hitting Earth 20-30 years from now, surely we can do it with one that is much closer?

Re:

[meadowsoft]

Unless the asteroid in question is small enough that it falls into the "OMFG HOW DID WE MISS THAT?!?! WE'RE DOOMED!!!" category. I can have a small asteroid knocking on our doorstep (a few hundred thousand kilometers, astronomically speaking) and still not be able to see it with the vast majority of instrumentation in our arsenal today.

Re:

[TapeCutter]

"Objects in orbit don't really change direction in radically unpredictable ways."

I think you're missing where I'm coming from [wikipedia.org]. A solid rock will indeed act as you have stated (pool table mechanics), but what if some of it was not so solid and it started to crumble under the gravity of close planetary (solar?) fly-by's, say a hundred orbits ago.

Coincidently, the "n-body problem" is a classical example of the "butterfly effect" (mentioned by Jane Q Public above).

I have absolutely no evidence that thi

Re:

[commodoresloat]

...but I wonder if it had anything to do with this [slashdot.org].

Are you suggesting an asteroid conspiracy?

OOOH, that West Texas Fireball...

[retech]

Sorry I was thinking this was a post about a small taco stand that kept me up 'till the early morning last Saturday.

Re:

[retech]

I've updated my calender, I'll give this a laugh a week from next Monday. Until then...

Re:

[GreenTech11]

I think the theory is that either the meteorite shattered on impact,/ or broke up close to the surface due to external factors i.e entry into the Earth's atmosphere etc. Rather than multiple meteorites.

West, Texas, not West Texas

[Dahan]

The town is named West, and it's not actually in West Texas [google.com]--it's more Central Texas.

Re:West, Texas, not West Texas

[spiffyman]

Thanks for pointing that out. Having family in west Texas, I was wondering why I hadn't heard about this. Incidentally, if you're ever driving through West, the kolaches at the Czech Stop there are worth stopping for.

Re:

[daveime]

They shouted at her, "Don't eat that sausage roll !" ?

Re:

[rakslice]

I think kdawson's Google is broken...

Re:Feed the Trolls

[krystar]

well technically, you could get hit by a meteor. a meteor doesn't become a meteorite until it lands on the ground. if you got hit by the falling object, that'd be a meteor hit. if it impacted ground and fragmented into debris and hit you, then it'd be a meteorite hit.

The story is a lie.

[Alsee]

It was a UFO, not a meteor!
This story about finding "meteorites" is just a government coverup!

Aliens walk among us.
The Rapture is near.

-

Re:

[Tubal-Cain]

Obviously the poor souls who found it got their brains eaten.

midwest farms a productive source of meteorites

[peter303]

I've heard of number of "hunters" who strap a magnetometer on their ATVs and criss-cross fallow fields looking for iron-stones within the top couple feet. This is the easiest terrain to routinely run ATVs over. Teh slashdot-types whould automate this with GPS and artificial intelligence.