Meteor over Russia

[Sinbad]

I saw a meteor last night as well. South of joburg around 10pm.

 

[zippy]

How do you reckon?

Maybe he thinks that nobody in Siberia spoke Russian until this meteor struck. Now they speak Russian, which is obvious from the footage

The dino's refused to speak Russian after "their" meteor and look what happened to them. We are smarter. If a meteor hits humans they learn to speak Russian, pronto. What is "pronto" in Russian, btw ?

 

[AlphaJohn]

They would have known about it for some time, but they kept it quite.Image if u told the public: well there is meteor coming ,Good news is we can shoot it into bits !! bad news we can also miss :/

They did not know about it, our radar is not good enough to pick up. Good news, if on directly hit's will not wipe out humanity our radar is ok on those(Note not all of em there might still be a killer out there that we do not know about unlikely but still possible), bad news is if it doesn't break up on its own and hit a city it might wipe out a couple of blocks.

As for the shoot it down bit, if you know anything about meteors you will know shooting at a large rock will just make it worse, you need to deflect it not break it up. Broken up asteroids just spreads the damage, not lessen it.

Edit: Oh as for the ones we know about, you can see them over http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/neo_map.html or http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ so no one is hiding anything from you

 

[Moosedrool]

Interesting read from NASA:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/news/asteroid20130215.html

I read 10 ton then 50 tons now they took it up from 7000 to 10000 tons and 17m wide. This is a pretty big peace of rock and to think it's traveling at more than 40 times the speed of sound relative to the earths surface. For the atmosphere to rip something like that apart so quickly is just as impressive as it's crater would be if there was no air covering our little planet.

 

[w1z4rd]

 

[AlphaJohn]

While we on foreign bodies, who else here can not wait for November 2013, well that is if C/2012 S1 survives the sun. With my luck the dam sun is gonna eat it.

 

[ponder]

For the atmosphere to rip something like that apart so quickly is just as impressive as it's crater would be if there was no air covering our little planet.

Yeah it's pretty interesting, kinda like a high velocity bullets disintegrating when fired into water.

 

[zippy]

They did not know about it, our radar is not good enough to pick up. Good news, if on directly hit's will not wipe out humanity our radar is ok on those(Note not all of em there might still be a killer out there that we do not know about unlikely but still possible), bad news is if it doesn't break up on its own and hit a city it might wipe out a couple of blocks.

As for the shoot it down bit, if you know anything about meteors you will know shooting at a large rock will just make it worse, you need to deflect it not break it up. Broken up asteroids just spreads the damage, not lessen it.

Edit: Oh as for the ones we know about, you can see them over http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/neo_map.html or http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ so no one is hiding anything from you

It probably depends on what it's composed of, and its density. If it is rock, more of the smaller pieces will burn up and the overall damage will be less. Something more dense, like iron and yes, and it will probably be worse. And if it is large and dense, it will be bad whatever.

 

[AlphaJohn]

It probably depends on what it's composed of, and its density. If it is rock, more of the smaller pieces will burn up and the overall damage will be less. Something more dense, like iron and yes, and it will probably be worse. And if it is large and dense, it will be bad whatever.

I did not want to go into it but I think this about covers it a tad more than my short post:

Nuclear weapons will not be a help in deflecting and mitigating asteroids unfortunately.

I'll put it into perspective but first remember the fundamental rule of physics, in that energy and mass are basically two sides of the same coin. You cannot deal with one independently, you have to address both the energy AND mass of an object.

Now for some perspective.

The Russian meteorite released an amount of energy estimated at 20 - 30 times the strength of the Hiroshima uranium 235 bomb, which itself was a 13-18 kiloton TNT yield. Current estimates by NASA are pegging that meteorite at 17 meters diameter, 10,000 tons in mass, and a speed relative to Earth of 40,000 mph. The energy release is estimated at 500,000 kt TNT.

This means that in order to stop this meteor completely we would have needed to hit it directly with 500,000 kt TNT equivalent force. The problem with nukes is that they are not directional blasts. By design they are, and must be, omnidirectional. This means that if we need 500,000 kt TNT energy to stop an asteroid, then we will need a MUCH larger bomb since a large amount of the blast will be wasted in all other directions.

Now obviously with asteroids we don't need to destroy them, just redirect them, again, because a nuke is not a directional blast, we will lose a LARGE amount of the energy to non-targeted directions. I forgot the math, I read it somewhere, but if I remember correctly you'd be looking at a 5% yield in any specific direction in space (the value differs wildly based on a number of variables, but 5% is the generous top-end).

So say we can reach the asteroid with enough time to spare that a trajectory alteration would be sufficient (logistics, rockets, hard to come by on short notice), we may only need 10,000 kt TNT of force to redirect the asteroid. We still need a nuke with a yield of 200,000 kt TNT, which is a significantly sized warhead, not a standard stockpile weapon (nobody makes those anymore, MIRVs are much more effective, clusters of lower yield result in much more damage terrestrially speaking).

So 200,000 kt TNT warhead (and the best rockets we can muster, and at least 6 months or even a year lead time to launch for planning testing and assembly) just to deflect a rock that makes a big boom and drops some small fragments in a lake.

Remember that as the mass scales, the energy requirement grows exponentially. This means that for the rocks we're actually worried about (ie, the ones we can see or potentially see, which the Russian meteorite was not, it was too small), nuclear weapons are sadly insufficient in terms of how they produce their energy.

The most that you can hope for with a nuclear weapon is to potentially break up a small moderately sized object like 2012 DA14 in a series of objects similar to the Russian meteorite, thus mitigating a potential localized damage impact into a series of fireballs in the sky. That is super-best-case for nukes though.

 

[Alan]

Time test the Tsar bomb design at its original intended yield of a hundred megatons and move on from there :twisted: