# Russian meteor strike!



## Badfish740 (Feb 15, 2013)

If this thing had hit in 1963 none of us would be here.  The Russians would have unleashed their arsenal, ours would have shortly followed and it would have been the dirt nap for my parents and a lot of forum members here!


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## woodgeek (Feb 15, 2013)

Very cool story/videos.

As for 1963, wasn't there but I doubt it. Sounds like less than a kiloton, airburst. I suspect that the Soviets would have had reports from the ground that showed damage << smallest nuke.

Heard that there is a hiroshima sized (~10 kiloton) airburst somewhere in the world about once a decade. By random chance most are over ocean and unihabited areas.

The solar system is not quite finished yet....makes me feel better about my DIY projects.


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## Badfish740 (Feb 15, 2013)

woodgeek said:


> As for 1963, wasn't there but I doubt it. Sounds like less than a kiloton, airburst. I suspect that the Soviets would have had reports from the ground that showed damage << smallest nuke.


 
I wasn't there either, but as a student of history, I know that there were some very itchy trigger fingers on both sides.


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## woodgeek (Feb 15, 2013)

I have also heard that there are no documented cases of humans dying from a meteor strike.  So far with this one, no reported fatalities.  Hopefully it will stay that way.

I once saw a bolide that was bright enough to light up the ground...saw a flash on the ground at night and looked up to see the meteor.  Inside Chicago city limits.


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## begreen (Feb 15, 2013)

That was an amazing and rare event! The sonic boom must have been intense. Sorry that it happened over a populated area. Estimates are 1200 people injured mostly from the 100,000 sq. mtrs. of shattered glass. A factory roof also collapsed. Thank goodness it wasn't worse. It's not every day that you have a 10 ton meteor streaking overhead.


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## Badfish740 (Feb 15, 2013)

I also learned from this that most Russians equip their cars with dash cameras (hence all of the footage) because the police are so corrupt.  If they get pulled over on a traffic stop they want everything documented.  Crazy...


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## Lumber-Jack (Feb 15, 2013)

Interesting that it happened so close to the time when DA14 meteor is doing it's fly by.  I bet we'll see a lot more footage of this meteorite explosion before too long.

As for all those nukes humans have armed and ready to go, it's a miracle nobody has used one yet. As more and more countries build and arm themselves with them, it's only a mater of time.


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## BrotherBart (Feb 15, 2013)

The biggie that is being missed is "President Vladimir Putin  said he thanked God no big fragments had fallen in populated areas".

A Communist thanking God. Wow!


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## blacktail (Feb 15, 2013)

Badfish740 said:


> I also learned from this that most Russians equip their cars with dash cameras (hence all of the footage) because the police are so corrupt. If they get pulled over on a traffic stop they want everything documented. Crazy...


 
I read they also use dash cams because there are so many scam artists who will back into other cars, or jump on the hood of a car and claim they were hit. One of the news stories had a couple videos of the meteor, and one of random Russian car wrecks. Seems they're not very good drivers over there.


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## Badfish740 (Feb 15, 2013)

BrotherBart said:


> The biggie that is being missed is "President Vladimir Putin  said he thanked God no big fragments had fallen in populated areas".
> 
> A Communist thanking God. Wow!


 
I think Putin veers more toward a kind of fascism.  He has aligned himself with the Orthodox Church in recent years which is why there was that big dustup with the all girl punk band with the funny name.


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## begreen (Feb 15, 2013)

Dash cams came in at the request of insurance companies. There were a lot of scams and organized crime groups fleecing the insurance co's. with staged accidents. Since being used people have gotten used to them and even like them because they've helped make police operations more transparent and have snagged corrupt policemen in the process. As a result of these traveling cams, the incidents filmed are amazing. They've convinced me that I don't want to drive in Russia. See the ash can post here: https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/believe-in-luck.105854/


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## yooperdave (Feb 15, 2013)

I am "unlearned" in the early detection of these meteors...but...since they already knew that an asteriod is passing close to earth, shouldn't they also have know that an object the size of a bus would enter the atmosphere over Russia?? Isn't a meteor an asteriod that has entered the atmosphere??

(Where's Kat when you need her?)


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## Badfish740 (Feb 15, 2013)

yooperdave said:


> I am "unlearned" in the early detection of these meteors...but...since they already knew that an asteriod is passing close to earth, shouldn't they also have know that an object the size of a bus would enter the atmosphere over Russia?? Isn't a meteor an asteriod that has entered the atmosphere??
> 
> (Where's Kat when you need her?)


 
It was actually the size of a kitchen table.  If it was the size of a bus I'm betting we'd be seeing 1000s dead instead of injured.  There is a department at NASA that looks for these things but apparently they're underfunded.


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## yooperdave (Feb 15, 2013)

The size of it is not the issue, the detection of it is. (I just repeated what I had heard on the radio reports as far as the size goes-they can't be wrong, right?!!)
Something as small as a missle can be detected and tracked, right?

I saw one as a child-at night. No explosion, just a very large fireball!  I think that means that it made it all the way to the surface.  This was in the 60's just a few years after the big missle crisis.


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## BrotherBart (Feb 15, 2013)

Now if the State Department could just convince the Russians that North Korea did it...


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## ScotO (Feb 15, 2013)

that was intense, crazy how small that thing was and the damage it caused.  I was particularly amazed at how bright it was upon entry into the atmosphere.......I can't imagine that sonic boom.......


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## fossil (Feb 15, 2013)

Badfish740 said:


> If this thing had hit in 1963 none of us would be here. The Russians would have unleashed their arsenal, ours would have shortly followed and it would have been the dirt nap for my parents and a lot of forum members here!


 
Nah, the people who needed to understand the event would have understood it. An ICBM is routinely detected at launch and tracked through its entire flight, it doesn't just suddenly fall out of the sky without everyone (who needs to know) knowing it's coming and from where.  Neither the USSR nor the USA was as naive and irresponsible as you're imagining. (I was 15 in 1963...we actually did have things like electricity & radar & stuff way back then). Rick


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## ScotO (Feb 15, 2013)

fossil said:


> Nah, the people who needed to understand the event would have understood it. An ICBM is routinely detected at launch and tracked through its entire flight, it doesn't just suddenly fall out of the sky without everyone (who needs to know) knowing it's coming and from where. Neither the USSR nor the USA was as naive and irresponsible as you're imagining. (I was 15 in 1963...*we actually did have things like electricity & radar & stuff way back then*). Rick


*REALLY??*


Just kiddin', bud.  My pap told me many stories about both politics and such from back in the day, he was in his 30's during those years.....He was as sharp as a tack, too.  We talked about the Kennedy assassination and he remembered what my gram was cooking, what the weather was like and even the smells in the house when the news of JFK came across the waves.....


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## Lumber-Jack (Feb 15, 2013)

fossil said:


> Nah, the people who needed to understand the event would have understood it. Rick


Those wouldn't happen to be the same people who understood there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, would they?


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## fossil (Feb 15, 2013)

Lumber-Jack said:


> Those wouldn't happen to be the same people who understood there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, would they?


 
I was addressing badfish's fear that the Russians might mistake this meteorite for a nuclear attack and immediately launch a military response.  Wouldn't happen today, and it wouldn't have happened in 1963.  (What that has to do with WMD's in Iraq is beyond me.)


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## Lumber-Jack (Feb 15, 2013)

fossil said:


> (What that has to do with WMD's in Iraq is beyond me.)


They both could be use as justification for starting a war. 
History has shown it doesn't take much to start a war, inevitable some country will find some reason to use a nuclear device against another country, likely the reason they'll use it won't make much sense to most of us. Betting on our leader to always make the right decisions is a bet you'll lose.


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## ScotO (Feb 15, 2013)

Lumber-Jack said:


> They both could be use as justification for starting a war.
> History has shown it doesn't take much to start a war, inevitable some country will find some reason to use a nuclear device against another country, likely the reason they'll use it won't make much sense to most of us. Betting on our leader to always make the right decisions is a bet you'll lose.


I couldn't agree more......and Russia most definately had an itchy trigger finger at that time (Cuban missle crisis, anyone?) Granted alot of that was political BS, I could see them thinking that the meteor was some kind of new US technology and I could most certainly see them jumping the gun and 'pushin the button'..........

On that note, I see this thing heading toward the ash can, and I ain't going there anymore.......I'm out.


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## BrotherBart (Feb 15, 2013)

fossil said:


> Nah, the people who needed to understand the event would have understood it. An ICBM is routinely detected at launch and tracked through its entire flight, it doesn't just suddenly fall out of the sky without everyone (who needs to know) knowing it's coming and from where. Neither the USSR nor the USA was as naive and irresponsible as you're imagining. (I was 15 in 1963...we actually did have things like electricity & radar & stuff way back then). Rick


 
http://wavs.unclebubby.com/wav/MOVIES/WarGames/holdatdefcon4.wav


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## StihlHead (Feb 15, 2013)

Badfish740 said:


> If this thing had hit in 1963 none of us would be here. The Russians would have unleashed their arsenal, ours would have shortly followed and it would have been the dirt nap for my parents and a lot of forum members here!


 
We came VERY close in '63 to WWIII when we drove a diesel nuke Russian sub under off of Cuba. They had last orders to strike before submerging. If it were not for one XO that flat refused to fire, they would have unleashed a nuclear torpedo or three on the US battle fleet in the Atlantic and started WWIII. They were forced to surface and went home in disgrace, but they were really heroes. A case of mis-communication all around nearly did many of us in. I was living in Florida at that time. I would have been vaporized. We also came very close to invading Cuba at that time, which would have likely also started WWIII. The paratroopers were ready in the planes and waiting orders. Kennedy called it off at the very last minute. If anything weird like this had happened in those tense moments, a second nuclear war could have started in a moment's notice. Khrushchev was itching to go to war.

Russia also had some other earlier huge meteorite strikes that leveled many square miles of landscape in Siberia.


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## Badfish740 (Feb 15, 2013)

StihlHead said:


> Russia also had some other earlier huge meteorite strikes that leveled many square miles of landscape in Siberia.


 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

The pictures from that one are crazy-1000 times more energy released than Hiroshima.


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## jharkin (Feb 15, 2013)

We have come close at least a few times that where publicized,  who knows how many times are classified. 

Classic example.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov


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## Mrs. Krabappel (Feb 15, 2013)

asteroid=larger rock and metal
meteoroid=smaller rock and metal, possibly even a piece of an asteroid
meteor=meteoroid that burns up upon entering the atmosphere
meteorite=meteor that reaches the surface of earth

meteors are small, so hard to detect.  There is the possibility with larger asteroids of influencing orbit enough to avoid collision.  

And then there's the dinosaurs.....


Very exciting day!  I love how everyone is talking about space.  That was some amazing video footage.


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## begreen (Feb 15, 2013)

fossil said:


> I was addressing badfish's fear that the Russians might mistake this meteorite for a nuclear attack and immediately launch a military response. Wouldn't happen today, and it wouldn't have happened in 1963. (What that has to do with WMD's in Iraq is beyond me.)


 
Even Russia has its Glenn Becks. There is a nutcase in the Russian Parliament that was sure this was an American attack.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...-says-meteor-was-actually-a-u-s-weapons-test/


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## begreen (Feb 15, 2013)

Mrs. Krabappel said:


> Very exciting day! I love how everyone is talking about space. That was some amazing video footage.


 
Carl would agree!


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## midwestcoast (Feb 16, 2013)

I had a great time listening to Science Friday when a bunch of astronomers, astrophysicists and other geeks (nicest way possible) were counting down the nearest approach.  Pretty cool to look up then & know that a great big ole' rock was winging past us at less than one tenth the distance btwn us and the moon.
Kinda puts some of our big problems & arguments into perspective. i.e. none of it really means much 'cause even put together we don't really amount to anything from a universal perspective.


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## woodgeek (Feb 16, 2013)

Ok, so my WAG was bad. Subsonic network data puts the blast energy in the 300-500 kiloton of TNT range....about 20-30x the size of Hiroshima. This was apparently the biggest event since Tunguska, and typically occur 1-2 times per century, and then mostly over the ocean. Good thing it was a crumbly rock, so it broke apart at altitude....a few percent of these objects are solid-nickel-iron and at this blast energy would have left a nice hole in the ground (~1000' across) instead 

One rule of thumb is that a 1 ton rock makes a blast like 1 ton of TNT....so this object likely weighed in at a third of a million tons. So that would work out to ~100-150 feet in diameter.

IF you are starting to worry about these things being dangerous.....the experts say the biggest risk is due to not to impact or airburst, but from tsunami's created by large events far out at sea.


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## pdf27 (Feb 16, 2013)

I do wonder if the Russians thought about engaging it with their ABM system. They've got quite a good one (nuclear warheads even IIRC), and they should have been able to track this on the way in and realise it could cause a lot of damage on the ground (although they should have identified it as a meteorite). If they didn't, this may start them thinking about doing so in future...


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## woodgeek (Feb 17, 2013)

Interesting.....one issue is that this object was prob moving several times faster than the leisurely speed of a sub-orbital warhead.  I would think that would make 'rendezvous' go from hard to impossible.  Does make you wonder if russian NORAD saw something unusual on their radar in real time...."that's no space station...that's a moon!" 

And I thought the ABMs were just around a couple cities as specified by the ABM treaty....


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## jharkin (Feb 17, 2013)

I thought the treaty only allowed one site, in their case being Moscow.  But didn't the treaty dissolve when Bush withdrew us from it?


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## pdf27 (Feb 17, 2013)

Speed really isn't that big a problem with things like this - after all they predicted how far the recent asteroid would miss earth by 6 months in advance, and the mechanics aren't a lot different. Once you've done that it's a matter of getting a big enough firework in the way. Reaction time might be an issue though - I've heard figures of the object being in the atmosphere for ~30 seconds, which probably isn't enough time to react.

The Russians still have the Moscow site working, but it's a little unclear exactly how far it covers. There are also rumours that a lot of their more recent SAM systems (S-300 and S-400) have some sort of ABM capability.


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## jharkin (Feb 17, 2013)

By the time its in the atmosphere, blowing it up just turns one big explosion into a lot of little ones... Trading a slug for a shotgun.

I think the consensus thinking is that even blowing up a big asteroid way out in space does more harm than good, you would turn a dinosaur killer into 10,000 tunguskas and do as much if not more damage to the planet. The only way to use a nuke to protect us is to intercept it very far out and use a glancing blow that nudges the trajectory of the rock to miss altogether.


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## BrotherBart (Feb 17, 2013)

begreen said:


> Even Russia has its Glenn Becks. There is a nutcase in the Russian Parliament that was sure this was an American attack.
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...-says-meteor-was-actually-a-u-s-weapons-test/


 
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blo...committee-questions-existence-of-meteors.html


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## MasterMech (Feb 17, 2013)

BrotherBart said:


> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blo...committee-questions-existence-of-meteors.html


This guy just sounds like an asshat.  Lemme guess, he thinks the world was created in six days roughly 6000 years ago too?


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## Ehouse (Feb 17, 2013)

jharkin said:


> By the time its in the atmosphere, blowing it up just turns one big explosion into a lot of little ones... Trading a slug for a shotgun.
> 
> I think the consensus thinking is that even blowing up a big asteroid way out in space does more harm than good, you would turn a dinosaur killer into 10,000 tunguskas and do as much if not more damage to the planet. The only way to use a nuke to protect us is to intercept it very far out and use a glancing blow that nudges the trajectory of the rock to miss altogether.


 

I think planting a clingon on the one that just passed us, and set to detonate after it's well away, would have been a smart move.


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## Mrs. Krabappel (Feb 17, 2013)

BrotherBart said:


> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blo...committee-questions-existence-of-meteors.html


 
That must be a joke.  Must be.


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## BrotherBart (Feb 17, 2013)

Mrs. Krabappel said:


> That must be a joke. Must be.


 
Sure it is. I think the last time Andy Borowitz said anything serious was when he was held in the air and slapped on the butt.


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## Frozen Canuck (Feb 17, 2013)

BB. That article has got to be a joke right? No way that's a serious piece. Fiction right? Close enough to April fools to begin now right? No way the chair of the science committee would say those things right?


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## BrotherBart (Feb 17, 2013)

Members of The Science Committee have said real things that are pretty much as stupid.


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## begreen (Feb 17, 2013)

MasterMech said:


> This guy just sounds like an asshat.  Lemme guess, he thinks the world was created in six days roughly 6000 years ago too?


 
It's a spoof. Think the Onion. Actually Smith said quite the opposite> http://science.house.gov/press-rele...eor-stark-reminders-need-invest-space-science


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## MasterMech (Feb 17, 2013)

begreen said:


> It's a spoof. Think the Onion.​


 
You mean BB was just funnin' all of us? Who'd a thunk it?


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## Jags (Feb 19, 2013)

Reported that it was traveling at 33000 MPH.   That would make for one tough target.


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## begreen (Feb 21, 2013)




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