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>According to unconfirmed reports, the meteorite was intercepted by an air defense unit Anyone else catch this? Is this just a bad translation and they mean to

• marshray 14y ago
  "BREAKING NEWS - Urals meteorite shot down by Russian air defense - military source >>"
  • apaprocki 14y ago
    In the comments "Next Russia Today probably will write Putin himself shot the meteorite from his hunters gun."
    • coopdog 14y ago
      While riding a bear http://guyism.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/putin-bear.jpg http://guyism.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/putin-bear.jpg
      • anonymfus 14y ago
        Relevant: http://cs6081.userapi.com/v6081385/508f/hhp8_8Hlg7g.jpg http://cs6081.userapi.com/v6081385/508f/hhp8_8Hlg7g.jpg (Source: http://zyalt.livejournal.com/722930.html http://zyalt.livejournal.com/722930.html )
• instakill 14y ago
  The next sentence follows with: A missile salvo reportedly blew the meteorite to pieces at an altitude of 20 kilometers.
  • irollboozers 14y ago
    They were playing real life missile command.
• eksith 14y ago
  A meteorite would be hypersonic when first entering the atomsphere and then supersonic the rest of the way until maybe a few hundred meters before impact. Besides that, if it's not a solid iron-nickle meteorite, it may even breakup or explode well above the surface instead of staying intact. It's not quite like taking out a satellite in low Earth orbit in that there's plenty of information on its orbit, trajectory, tumbling characteristics, approximate mass etc... It would be very, very, very hard to intercept a meteorite without a lot of information before it even got close to Earth. The report of a missile salvo taking it out is very suspect IMO. Without more information, it's hard to tell.
  • jandrewrogers 14y ago
    I don't know about "taking it out" per se but an air defense system designed to hit ballistic missiles in the terminal phase could also hit an inbound meteorite. It is within the performance envelope of those types of systems. That said, against a meteorite it won't do much good since it is an inert mass. It is plausible that the Russians launched an interceptor just to be safe. If it is a meteor, it neither hurts nor helps. If it is a man-made structure, it will do some real damage to it. Either way they can always argue "better safe than sorry".
    • eksith 14y ago
      Russians have scientists working on the meteorite problem, but I doubt the military would do a hail Mary launch on this. If anything, they would much rather let it fall intact than risk having it break up and spread damage to a much larger area. But that still assumes they can respond quickly enough or had missiles on standby with weapons that can affect a meteorite (not specifically ballistic reentry capsules, but actual meteorites). There's a worrying thought. It may be hot enough for infrared seekers, but it's no jet. Jets are fragile by comparison so, unless they had purely kinetic weapons... but that's still speculation at this point. We still don't know what the Russians did or if they did anything at all. I doubt they even knew this specific meteor would enter the atmosphere. It's already hard enough detecting much bigger rocks in Earth-crossing orbits.
• thresh 14y ago
  that's BS. Even S-300 or S-400 are unable to catch such a high-speed meteorite. And we don't have anything better than those.
  • mbell 14y ago
    It seems remotely possible. The short range missile in the S-400 can reach mach 12 and at least one source [1] seems to indicate that a meteorite at 15-20km altitude would be traveling 4500-9000mph (roughly mach 6-12) and of course they wouldn't be likely to be in a complete 'chasing' orientation. I also wouldn't think a meteorite would be that hard to track with radar once you have an initial direction on it, depending on its composition. [1] http://www.amsmeteors.org/fireballs/faqf/ http://www.amsmeteors.org/fireballs/faqf/
• jpxxx 14y ago
  Just so we're all on the same general reality, that part of the report is a profound and total lie, promulgated by a broken media system for uninteresting but undoubtedly unsavory reasons.
• InclinedPlane 14y ago
  It's not impossible, but incredibly implausible. First off there isn't any evidence of an interception in any of the videos. Second, intercepting a hypersonic object with ordinary SAM sites is pretty much not going to happen. The amount of time it would take just to get a radar lock let alone to launch missiles would not leave much time for interception. Interestingly, Russia does have an active ABM system. The old ABM-treaty allowed both the US and the USSR to have one ABM site active for each country, the US shut theirs down fairly quickly but the Soviets maintained and later upgraded theirs, protecting Moscow, and Russia has kept it. It's a nuclear warhead based system, it would be interesting to see what the hell would have happened if the same event happened over Moscow instead of Chelyabinsk.
• cynwoody 14y ago
  I'd be amused to hear Mathias Rust's assessment of that report. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust
  • lutusp 14y ago
    I doubt anyone remembers Mathias Rust's famous and uninterrupted flight to Red Square. :)