5 ms·
California Meteor Broke Speed Record for Atmospheric Entry
- tzaman 14y agoEnd of world attempt gone wrong :)
- Sharlin 14y agoThe title is misleading; as the actual article states, it was the highest entry velocity recorded for recovered meteorites. It's not atypical that your run-of-the-mill shooting stars enter at relative velocities of over 50 km/s; for example, the entry velocity of the objects in the well-known Leonid swarm is circa 72 km/s.
- maeon3 14y agoHow much warning did we have for this Nuclear sized explosion to happen over California? Why am I just now hearing about this after the event? Are these asteroids that unpredictable to track?
- Sharlin 14y agoIt's currently not feasible to track such small objects. Fortunately, there's no real need to - a kiloton-scale explosion high in the atmosphere is pretty much a non-event. Asteroids circa 10m in diameter impact the atmosphere approximately once per year - no casualties have ever been recorded from such events (actually, there are no human casualties from any impact event in the recorded history.) The real blind spot currently lies in the 100m scale - these could cause massive local damage on impact (cf. Tunguska) and there are no comprehensive tracking programs in place at the time. Such events are predicted to occur every 100 to 1000 years (but the probability of hitting a densely inhabited area is still extremely low.)