Space Junk or a Meteor? Fireball Lit Up Midwestern Skies 87
The Space Reporter has this to say about a fireball witnessed by many midwesterners on Thursday night:
"The massive fireball was seen in the early morning hours in Iowa on Thursday night. At least 700 people have reported a sighting and the fireball was reported by people across the Midwest, including Iowa, Illinois, Missouri and Nebraska. However, astronomers say they are still unsure whether the fireball was the result of space debris or a meteor. Officials at the National Weather Service say they are working to determine the source of the fireball, although the leading theory seems to support a meteor was the source." CCTV footage of the fireball is great, though it doesn't stack up to the world of Russian dashcams.
CCTV Link (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SdI7KnLGN8 [youtube.com]
Missing from story.
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Atmospheric friction has little effect on the velocity and the smallest ones survive the voyage to the Earth’s surface are quickly slowed by atmospheric friction to speeds of a few hundred kilometers per hour
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Wow, botched grammar *and* completely contradicting itself in one setence! We got a winner here, folks.
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contradicting itself in one setence!
And, true to form, Muphery strikes again [wikipedia.org].
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It could have been part of a /. news posting. The biggest news here is that it isn't.
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Or a sign of bad (mechanical) language translation?
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Or it was too timely.
This.
These days slashdot is a great place to go when you want to discuss last week's news....
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One error is excusable, but three or more glaring errors are absolutely unacceptable.
Absolutely. You should ask for your money back.
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There was a submission, yesterday, that surely would more dutifully apply to being the most shittiest..."
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Missing from story.
Well, not exactly missing so much as our Dice overlords apparently don't know how to properly format an anchor tag. Up next, they'll be telling us of a new trend sweeping the industry called "Doing the needful"...
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I flubbed at adding the link, evidently. Fixing.
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When done, please to be reverting the same.
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Busted Link to Footage! (Score:2)
Yay!
Broken link (Score:4, Informative)
this video [youtube.com] works better :)
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They never "detect" anything.
Re:National Weather Service? (Score:5, Funny)
IT was an UFO we shot down but we are calling it some kind of weather equipment
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IT was an UFO we shot down but we are calling it some kind of weather equipment
Let's not jump to conclusions, yet. We must correlate this with reports of missing persons, anal probings, and the number of cows that have been turned inside-out in the area.
Re:National Weather Service? (Score:5, Funny)
Did any news agencies bother to ask them if they even detected something?
They did - And even released footage of the incident, including footage from a fighter jet -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNeMNXQBzd8 [youtube.com]
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Which begs the question: who are you stealing wifi from?
No it doesn't [homestead.com]
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Was it unidentified? If yes, then it came out of TX or the south. See Northers know everything and could have identified the fuck out of it. You need to bone up on your media stereotypes. Nothing unidentified ever falls in Iowa.
Geesh some people.
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then it came out of TX or the south.
Odd, I didn't know Texas was straight east from Iowa...
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And that's because the last time they tried to land in both New York and Los Angeles they were found in an alley naked and beaten with a garden hose up their ass and their spacecraft stripped on cinder blocks. So much for "civilized places"....
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And that's because the last time they tried to land in both New York and Los Angeles they were found in an alley naked and beaten with a garden hose up their ass and their spacecraft stripped on cinder blocks. So much for "civilized places"....
These are NYC and LA police we are talking about. They're already pissed off that some dumb-ass is driving around on the streets w/o a tag or proper lighting. On top of that, they have flames shooting out of the back of the ship/car, and have a couple thousand dollars in illegal ground effects lighting blinding the hell out of other motorists. Then when they ask for a drivers license and registration these bastards not only don't provide either, they respond with some sort of clicking and beeping sounds. I
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Heh... I was just trying to explain the cab drivers in those cities... Hadn't thought of the PD.... That explains a lot. The PD is pissed because they were beaten and left naked with garden hoses up their asses in that alley...
In morse code : (Score:2, Funny)
If you read the trail dots it leaves, and translate into morse code, it would be like .. .- (dot dot (space) dot stripe)
if you translate that i reads:
I ET
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I think you misread the morse code. Watch it again, I believe it says dot slash backwards... slash dot :p
I saw it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was driving east on I-80 in Council Bluffs, IA. At the time I wondered if it was a meteor or something man made. It was bright white but had a green hue as it broke up.
I was also a bit grateful there was no earth shattering kaboom.
Gamera (Score:2)
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If you were to add the word "change" there might be plenty of money available for such a study
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They should called a biologist as its obviously a flying turtle.
Couldn't be. Gamera [nocookie.net] gives off more of a pinkish hue than green.
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What was it launched from?
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Maybe it was an NSA satellite that needed to come down all of a sudden...
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I was also a bit grateful there was no earth shattering kaboom.
Why? That would have been fucking AWESOME!
Fuck JavaScript. (Score:1)
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Someone explain to me why the strange behavior of the tail before the object seemingly veers off.
Probably just burning up unevenly. Many celestial objects are not uniform in their composition. They are composed of different materials of varying density and some also have gas pockets - or holes, or empty spaces, anyway. I've seen one meteor changing colour as it fell, and when it broke in two, it appeared to suddenly change direction, because one of the two diverging remnants was burning much more brightly than the other.
So, unless its path described a curve, or it turned back on itself, slowed or accel
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Someone explain to me why the strange behavior of the tail before the object seemingly veers off.
I don't think it is veering off, it is entering a cloud bank.
I'll take the blame (Score:3)
That was the top of my skull reentering orbit after my head exploded at the end of the Chiefs-Chargers game (eliminating the Steelers from the playoffs).
day after christmas (Score:5, Funny)
The time of the event (Score:1)
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Security systems that actually have the correct date/time are quite possibly rarer than those that have the date/time wrong. Most often the things get installed by an overworked and undertrained electrician who doesn't have any incentive to set the time, and even if he did it's just a standard PC clock that wanders and no one ever goes back to maintain the thing until it fails.
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The CCTV date-time stamp shows Dec. 26, 2013, at 17:43 hours. This is 5:43 PM on the day after Christmas.
That's the correct time.
Please please please (Score:2)
Let it hit Chicago!
Quadrantid? (Score:2)
I'm sure some fellow Slashdotters will respond: "No -- Bootid!"
Burned up before it hit the ground (Score:3)
It burned up before it hit the ground, so it probably wasn't anything very big or very solid. Ice or rock, probably. Yawn.
Some space junk does make it all the way down. Titanium or stainless steel pressure tanks [nasa.gov] often make it relatively intact. Less solid stuff rarely does.
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so it probably wasn't anything very big
The footage taken in North Liberty, looks pretty much the same as what I saw myself just south of Des Moines, which in turn matches pretty closely with descriptions from people who saw it over by Council Bluffs.
If you take a look at an Iowa map, you'll find that covers most of the width of the entire state.
That would seem to indicate a sizeable object and a long distance. It was substantially bigger and brighter than the "shooting star" meteors that one can spot on a pretty regular basis.
Exactly what happened to the Dino's (Score:1)
The dinosaurs were in a similar situation a while back.
At first, they had a few of these things falling from the sky, posting them on youtube, twittering them etc. Not really thinking much of it.
Little did they know, it was the only pre-warning to their extinction. Also destroying Youtube and Twitter in the process.
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Also destroying Youtube and Twitter in the process.
We can only hope.
dashcams (Score:2)
Jose Chung's From Outer Space (Score:1)
Poor Starbuck (Score:2)
It was Starbuck that burnt up in the atmosphere, but dont worry she reappeared as an angel to the colonial fleet and will in fact jump the fleet back in time during the dawn of man which is where our species will eventually descend from one of the crewmates daughter's "Hera" aka mitochondrial Eve. :-)
Its just ... (Score:2)
... another 787.
East to West? Prob not space junk (Score:1)
If it was space junk then it was a piece of junk in a very rare retrograde orbit (moving East to West). Footage shows the fireball clearly moving from right to left from a north facing camera. Almost all satellites and spacecraft are in prograde orbits, launched Eastward to take advantage of the earth's rotation, or in polar orbits which move in a north or south direction depending on where the earth is in the orbit's sweep.
Israel has launched five Ofeq reconnaissance satellites in retrograde orbit, and t
Morans (Score:1)