To be Shot at and Missed
Imagine the mess it would have made if it had made it to the ground…not a global catastrophe by any stretch, but the town of Chelyabinsk could have had far more serious casualties.
Of course, I’m talking about the Chelyabinsk Event yesterday when a meteor exploded 20 miles up, broke windows, and dropped fragments around. Weird how it had nothing to do with the 2012 DA14 asteroid flyby on the same day, which makes it just downright creepy. If they’d said that it was a fragment of the one that missed, on the same trajectory, well then that’s understandable. But, for the planet to get whacked by a once in 100 year asteroid, near a populated area, on the same day as a similarly rare close flyby from whole another direction…makes you feel like the 8 ball in a game of cosmic billiards.
Could the little one have been detected? No one has technology refined enough to see things that small. No one even saw 2012 DA14, which is much bigger, until…well…2012. They’re not even trying to detect rocks the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor. Those aren’t considered large enough to be a serious hazard. I know that a small town in Russia feels the hazard, but what are the odds? Most of the planet is covered by water and thus completely uninhabited by people and something like this might have not even been seen by anyone.
Will it happen again? Probably, but don’t hold your breath. But even 2012 DA14 is far too small to have been a world changing event even if it had hit us. By the way, don’t think that it’s safer if something as big as DA14 hit an ocean somewhere. Tsunamis could spread the effects of the impact around, unless it exploded in the air like in Chelyabinsk or the 1908 Tunkuska Event, a meteor about the size of 2012 DA14 that exploded over Siberia and leveled about 800 square miles.
Someone on Twitter was claimed to have heard of a found a fresh impact crater near the event with a baby inside wrapped in a blue cape with big yellow “S” on it. Hmm…. ;-)
- Bye-Bye, Flyby on This Week @NASA (spaceref.com)
- Meteorite madness (lithics.wordpress.com)
- Near-miss: 150-foot-wide asteroid to dart past Earth (rt.com)
- The Sky is Falling! Asteroids and Meteors in the same day! – Wired (wired.com)
- Asteroid Gives Earth Record-Setting Close Shave Today: How to Watch Online (space.com)
- A meteor just exploded over Russia (io9.com)
- The Meteorite Explosion that Shook Chelyabinsk, Russia on February 15, 2013 (tvaraj.com)
- Earth’s Near Misses With Asteroids (wnyc.org)
- Asteroid Buzzes Earth in Record-Breaking Flyby (news.discovery.com)
- Asteroid MISSES Earth | We are Still ALIVE !! NOT End of the World [VIDEO] (secretsofthefed.com)