Philip Messing and Hasani Gittens
NY Post
Sun, 02 Sep 2007 09:57
EDT
Head for the hills! A mysterious giant "fireball" was spotted exploding over the ocean off the Jersey Shore last night, but officials had no idea last night what it was.
The unidentified falling object was first seen at about 8:40 p.m. by people on Normandy Beach in Ocean County, and was also spotted as far away as Fire Island and South Carolina, officials said.
"It was dispatched as a fireball, out over the ocean, going into the ocean," Deputy Chief Tim Cook of the Toms River, N.J., Fire Department told The Post.
At least 15 witnesses on the beach all described the same thing, he said.
"It was a large fireball that came down and sort of dropped down into the ocean."
Coast Guard cutters and helicopters were dispatched, but found nothing, said Coast Guard spokesman Petty Officer Nyx Cangemi.
"It's a real mystery," he added.
The FAA also had no idea what it was.
"We have no planes reported missing," said agency spokesman Jim Peters who said he checked with area airports and nearby McGuire Air Force Base.
Some officials speculated that it may have been a comet or a meteor, but a spokeswoman with the New Jersey Astrological Association said, "It's news to us."
The rare Aurigid meteor shower - which produces blue and green lights - was expected to take place last night, and may have been to blame.
David Shiga
Newscientist
Wed, 05 Sep 2007 09:55 EDT
The world's largest digital camera has been installed on a new telescope designed to hunt for potentially dangerous asteroids.
The camera was installed on the PS1 telescope in Maui, Hawaii, US, the first of four telescopes being built as part of a project called the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS).
Pan-STARRS will make frequent scans of the sky, searching for asteroids that could pose an impact threat to Earth (see New telescope will hunt dangerous asteroids).
Typical consumer digital cameras offer imaging chips just a few millimetres across. The new Pan-STARRS camera, by contrast, boasts a light-detecting surface that spans 40 centimetres. Sixty separate chips lie on that surface, providing a total of 1.4 billion pixels.
"This is a truly giant instrument," says John Tonry of the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) at the University of Hawaii, who led the team that developed the camera. "It allows us to measure the brightness of the sky in 1.4 billion places simultaneously."
"This camera is an incredibly complex instrument, and getting it working has been a magnificent achievement by IfA scientists and engineers," says Rolf-Peter Kudritzki, director of the IfA, which manages the Pan-STARSS project.
Watch a video about the new camera (requires Flash player).
Starting in 2010, when all four of the planned Pan-STARRS telescopes are expected to be completed, the project will image the whole sky visible from Hawaii three times per month. This should allow it to detect objects 100 times fainter than current surveys, including 99% of the asteroids 300 metres or larger that come near Earth's orbit.
NASA is expected to have found about 90% of the objects 1 kilometre or larger in Earth's neighbourhood by 2008. Smaller objects have been less well surveyed. But because the smaller objects are more numerous, they have a higher chance of hitting Earth.
The US Congress has asked NASA to identify 90% of the smaller objects - down to 140 metres across - by 2020, but NASA says it does not have the money to implement the search (see Could Venus watch for Earth-bound asteroids?.
BBC News
Thu, 06 Sep 2007 14:13
EDT
A meteorite shower is suspected to have caused a spate of emergency calls off the coast of north-east England.
Coastguards were alerted to what appeared to be red flares being fired into the sky off Saltscar Buoy, near Redcar, Teesside, on Wednesday night.
A lifeboat was launched but the search was called off after a large number of similar calls came in along the coast, spanning from Tyneside to Humberside.
 |
| ©MCA |
The RNLI said it believed the calls were sparked by a "natural phenomenon."
'False alarms'
Dave Cocks, of Redcar lifeboat station, said: "Everyone involved was happy that this was a natural phenomenon and not a real distress signal.
"The sightings along the coast led the coastguard to conclude that the calls they had received were false alarms with the best of intentions and the lifeboat was stood down.
"The situation was further complicated by the fact that there was helicopter activity in the area at exactly the same time and the aircraft's lights may also have been mistaken for distress flares."
Humber Coastguard received the emergency calls at 2045 BST.
AFP
Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:36 EDT
The extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago can be traced to a collision between two monster rocks in the asteroid belt nearly 100 million years earlier, scientists report on Wednesday.
 |
| ©Southwest Research Institute |
| Computer modeling shows that the parent object of asteroid (298) Baptistina, which was approximately 170-kilometres in diameter with characteristics similar to carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, was disrupted 160 million years ago when it was hit by another asteroid estimated to be 60-kilometres in diameter (L) .The extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago can be traced to a collision between two monster rocks in the asteroid belt nearly 100 million years earlier, scientists report. The two pictures on the right show remnants of the collision impacting the Earth and Moon. Image obtained from Southwest Research Institute. |
The smash drove a giant sliver of rock into Earth's path, eventually causing the climate-changing impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs and enabled the rise of mammals -- including, eventually, us.
Other asteroid fragments smashed into the Moon, Venus and Mars, pocking their faces with mighty craters, the US and Czech researchers believe.
Mixing skills in time travel, jigsaw-making and carbon chemistry, the trio carried out a computer simulation of the jostling among orbital rubble left from the building of the Solar System.
The sleuths were guided by an intriguing clue -- a large asteroid called (298) Baptistina, which shares the same orbital track as a group of smaller rocks.
Turning the clock back, the simulation found that the Baptistina bits not only fitted together, they were also remnants of a giant parent asteroid, around 170 kilometers (105 miles) across, that once cruised the innermost region of the asteroid belt.
Around 160 million years ago -- the best bet in a range of 140-190 million years -- this behemoth was whacked by another giant some 60 kms (37 miles) across.
From this soundless collision was born a huge cluster of rocks, including 300 bodies larger than 10 kms (six miles) and 140,000 bodies larger than one kilometer (0.6 of a mile).
Over aeons, the fragments found new orbits with the help of something called the Yarkovsky effect, in which thermal photons from the Sun give a tiny yet inexorable push to orbiting rocks.
As the family gradually split up, a large number of chunks -- perhaps one in five of the bigger ones -- crept their way out of the asteroid belt and became ensnared by the gravitional pull of the inner planets.
Around 65 million years ago, a 10-km (six mile) piece crunched into Earth, unleashing a firestorm and kicking up clouds of dust that filtered out sunlight.
In this enduring winter, much vegetation was wiped out and the species that depended on them also became extinct. Only those animals that could cope with the new challenge, or could exploit an environmental niche, survived.
The trace of the great event, called the Cretaceous/Tertiary Mass Extinction, can be seen today in the shape of a 180-km (112-mile) -diameter impact crater at modern-day Chicxulub, in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.
The trio of researchers -- William Bottke, David Vokrouhlicky and David Nesvorny of Southwest Research Institute in Colorado -- took their theory a stage further and checked out sediment samples from the Chicxulub site.
They found traces of a mineral called carbonaceous chondrite, which is only found in a tiny minority of meteorites, as the earthly remains of plummeting asteroids are called. Most asteroids can be excluded from the Chicxulub event, but not Baptistina-era ones, they contend.
Putting simulation and chemical evidence together, the team rule out theories that a comet was to blame rather than an asteroid, and say there is a "more than 90 percent" probability that the killer rock was a refugee from the Baptistina family.
The investigators also put a 70-percent probability that a four-km (2.5-mile) Baptistina asteroid hit the Moon some around 108 million years ago, forming the 85-km (52-mile) crater Tycho.
The probability is lower than for Chicxulub because it is based only on a simulation.
The peak of "Baptistina bombardment" was probably around 100 million years ago but is not over yet, the paper cautions.
Many of the asteroids that skim dangerously close to Earth today owe their orbits to that great collision in the deep past, according to the authors.
"We are in the tail end of this shower now," says Bottke. "Our simulations suggest that about 20 percent of the present-day near-Earth asteroid population can be traced back to the Baptistina family."
Itar-Tass
Fri, 31 Aug 2007 15:47
EDT
The Russian Federal Space Agency plans creating a system of anti-asteroid protection after 2026, the agency's director Anatoly Perminov told a news conference on Friday.
As for the Federal Space Agency's plans Perminov said "we have prepared proposals of the space activity for the years to 2040".
"They have all aspects, including flights of the Moon and Mars. Now it is necessary to formulate the financial and resource support," he said.
The proposals envisage three stages.
The first, which is planned for the years to 2015, is completing the assembly of the Russian segment of the International Space Station, enhancing the effectiveness of the transportation system, and preparing a scientific-technological basis for further stages of the space program.
The making of means of delivery and a new-generation transportation system is a plan for the second stage.
Russia is going to extend the use of the International Space Station to 2020.
The third stage envisages preparing manned flights to the Moon and Mars by 2025.
The landing on the Moon is to be prepared by 2025, and the setting up of a base on the Moon in 2027-35, Perminov said.
The flight to Mars is planned after 2035.
The need to create a system of protection of the Earth from
asteroids is prompted by computations by specialists, who say that
asteroid Apophis is bound to fly at a 40,000-kilometer distance from
the Earth in 2009, and there is a risk of it colliding with the Earth
in 2036.
BBC News
Fri, 31 Aug 2007 17:59
EDT
UK space scientists and engineers have designed a mission to investigate a potentially hazardous asteroid.
The 300m-wide (980ft) rock, known as Apophis, will fly past Earth in April 2029 at a distance that is closer than many communications satellites.
Astrium, based in Stevenage, Herts, wants a probe to track the asteroid so its orbit can be better understood.
 |
| ©Astrium |
| Under the proposal Apex would rendezvous with Apophis in January 2014 and spend three years sending data back to scientists and engineers on Earth. From the data, orbit modelling would enable an accurate prediction of the risk of collision with our planet. |
The concept will compete for a $50,000 (£25,000) Planetary Society prize, but a full mission would cost millions.
The British design calls for a small, remote-sensing spacecraft, dubbed Apex (Apophis Explorer), which could rendezvous with Apophis in January 2014.
It would then spend the next three years tracking the rock, sending data back to Earth about the object's size, shape, spin, composition and temperature.
From this information, orbit modelling would enable a more accurate prediction of the risk of any future collision.
Astrium says that if its concept won the prize, it would donate the money to charity.
"The real prize for us would be if the European or US space agencies thought there was merit in our proposal and asked us to carry the feasibility study forward," said Dr Mike Healy, the company's space science director.
A full mission would be expected to cost about $500m (£250m) dollars to develop, launch and operate.
Early warning
Apophis caused some consternation in 2004 when initial observations suggested there was an outside chance it might hit Earth in 2029.
Further study by ground-based telescopes indicated there was virtually no possibility of this happening, and the expectation is that the object will whiz past the Earth at a close but comfortable distance of just under 36,000km (22,400 miles).
Talk of a possible strike on another visit in 2036 has also been dampened by astronomers who have kept a careful watch on the rock's progress through space.
However, there is always some uncertainty associated with an asteroid's orbit.
One reason is the Yarkovsky effect. This describes what happens when an asteroid radiates energy absorbed from the Sun back into space.
Releasing heat in one direction nudges the object in the opposite direction. The resulting acceleration is tiny, but over the centuries acts like a weak rocket and could make the difference between a hit or a miss in some circumstances.
The close encounter with Earth in 2029 will also perturb Apophis' orbit gravitationally.
A mission like Apex to track and study the rock would help reduce uncertainties and give solid predictions about the rock's course long into the future.
Political support
At the moment, scientists stress Apophis is not thought to be a serious danger to Earth.
But were such a rock to hit the planet, it could cause devastation on a country-wide scale, leading possibly to the deaths of many millions of people.
An Apophis-like object striking at about 20km/s (45,000mph) would gouge a crater 5km (three miles) wide. Even standing 30km (18 miles) away from the impact site, a thermal blast would ignite your clothes and the ground would shudder with an earthquake measuring more than six on the Richter Scale.
Rocks thrown up into the air by the impact would rain down - many of them huge lumps a metre wide.
Given sufficient warning, though, a potential impactor could be deflected out of Earth's path, scientists believe.
Some have suggested such a rock might be nudged on to a safe trajectory by hitting it with a small mass. Others have proposed flying a spacecraft next to the object, to use gravity to tug the asteroid clear of the planet.
The issue of asteroid or comet strikes is a topical one as researchers continue to gather more information about their frequency during Earth history.
At least one of the planet's mass extinction events - which included the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago - has been attributed to the impact of a large space object.
Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik has campaigned for the research area to be given more funding. His grandfather, renowned Estonian astronomer Ernst Opik, did much to raise science's understanding of Earth-crossing comets and asteroids.
The politician told the BBC News website: "The question isn't whether Earth is hit by an asteroid - it is when.
"Good luck to Astrium; they are showing that if we have the political will, we certainly have the technical know-how to do something about threatening objects."
The US-based Planetary Society has organised its competition in co-operation with the European Space Agency (Esa), the US space agency (Nasa), the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA).
The winning entry will be submitted to space agencies to see if they want to carry the ideas through.
Nic Fleming, Science Correspondent
Telegraph
Thu, 06 Sep 2007
05:20 EDT
Some have proposed blasting them with a nuclear warhead. Others have drawn up plans for robotic tugs to alter their course.
Of all the plans to save mankind from the threat of extinction caused by a collision with an asteroid, tying a yellow ribbon around one must be the least violent and complex of all.
 |
| ©New Scientist Magazine |
Scientists have proposed doing just that as a way of placing an astronaut on an asteroid's surface to study its composition.
In the 1998 film Armageddon, astronauts sent to drop a nuclear device into a shaft drilled into an asteroid on collision course with Earth use rocket-assisted space suits to solve the problem of the lack of gravity that would otherwise see them flying off into space.
However researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have proposed a less power-hungry and cheaper plan.
One end of a spool of tough polymer ribbon would be anchored to the asteroid as an un-manned space vehicle, controlled from a nearby spacecraft, orbited it.
After one orbit the vehicle would cut the ribbon, which would be held taut by a device.
This process would be repeated, leaving two bands of ribbon six feet apart. An astronaut placed on the asteroid's surface would be equipped with a waistband from which four telescopic arms project. These would clip into the ribbons.
The system would allow the astronaut to explore and take samples from the asteroid without bouncing off the surface and floating away. It could be used to determine an asteroid's precise composition, giving scientists working on ways to prevent a collision with Earth the detailed information they would need.
Ian Garrick-Bethell from MIT, who developed the plan with colleague Christopher Carr, told New Scientist magazine: "We want to see an asteroid mission in the near future, so we did not want to rely on technologies that don't exist."
Over 150 large impact craters caused by asteroids or fragments of asteroids have been identified on the Earth's surface.
Nasa's spacecraft Dawn, due to launch later this month, will orbit and study the asteroids Vesta and Ceres, in 2011 and 2015 respectively.
The space agency is known to be considering plans for another mission involving landing an astronaut on an asteroid.
British space scientists last week completed a proposal for a mission to send a probe to study the Apophis asteroid which experts fear could be diverted onto a collision course with Earth with impact on April 13, 2036.
NewKerala.com
Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:23
EDT
Washington - A global catastrophe brought about by a meteorite strike would equally affect marine life forms living two miles below the sea, as on land, according to a new study by a researcher from the University of Southampton.
Scientists had earlier believed that bacteria, shrimp, snails and mussels that live around deep-sea hydrothermal vents would be safe from such destruction.
These creatures have flourished since the time life evolved on this planet, despite the fact that they do not receive any sunlight.
These colonies get nutrition from the minerals dissolved in the superheated water that spews out from the vents.
Researchers believed that since the food source of the creatures living around the vents was independent from the world above, a catastrophe such as a giant asteroid collision, which can kick up a cloud of debris that blocks the Sun for months or years, wouldn't affect the vent ecosystems.
Now, a new study by Jon Copley has found that the offspring
of some of these creatures grow up away from the life-sustaining vents
and depend for food on whatever material sinks down from the sunlit
surface waters.
In fact, the vent inhabitants time the birth of their offspring
with the seasons -even though they cannot see the Sun. They time the
release of their young to the spring bloom of the microscopic plant
life that grows on the ocean's surface - stuff that sinks after it
dies, the study revealed.
"I used to think these deep-sea communities would be safe from whatever havoc happens up here. But finding seasonality down there shows that life beneath the waves is far more connected than we realized," said Copley.
Copley further said, deep sea vent communities could be adversely impacted due to climate change induced alteration in surface waters, although till date no evidence has been found of this.
The study was presented at the British Association for the Advancement of Science's Festival of Science, reports LiveScience.
SpaceWeather.com
Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:33
EDT
On Sept 13th at approximately 3 o'clock in the morning MDT, an extremely bright fireball streaked over New Mexico, "It was terrifying," says eyewitness Susan K. Burgess. "I was stargazing outside my house near Santa Fe when the landscape started becoming very bright, as if a brilliant full moon was quickly rising from the southwest. The fireball itself [slowly moved] over the house and disintegrated with a great deal of scatter in the northwest sky."
At the Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, a Sentinel all-sky video camera captured the fireball in flight.
Click to view the complete movie.
Based on data from the video, the visual magnitude of the fireball was -14.6, about four times brighter than a full Moon!
"The fireball was a pure emerald green, uncomfortably bright to look at," adds Harald Edens located in the Magdalena Mountains west of Socorro, NM. "The object was disintegrating when I saw it, with pieces parallel-tracking and trailing the fireball. Those smaller pieces had all different colors--most notably red. I think it has been a piece of space junk."
Amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft not only photographed the fireball, but also recorded echos of a distant radio station bouncing off the meteor's ionized trail: movie. "This fireball turned night into day!" he says.
Spaceweather.com
Mon, 17 Sep 2007 09:13 EDT
ANOTHER FIREBALL: "After seeing the September 13th New Mexico fireball on spaceweather.com, I was surprised to catch a very bright fireball here in Texas just two nights later," reports Tom King who operates an all-night, all-sky camera near Watauga, Texas, not far from Dallas/Fort Worth. "In the video, you can see where the meteor is bright enough to illuminate a power poleand trees!"
 |
| ©Watauga Skies Observatory |
SUN ON FIRE: "Today the southeastern limb of the sun looks like it is burning," says Cai-Uso Wohler who took this picture from his backyard in Bispingen, Germany. The sun has been blank for days; "I hope this activity means there will be a sunspot coming around the limb soon." Amateur astronomers with solar telescopes are encouraged to monitor the situation.
ANOTHER FIREBALL: "After seeing the September 13th New Mexico fireball on spaceweather.com, I was surprised to catch a very bright fireball here in Texas just two nights later," reports Tom King who operates an all-night, all-sky camera near Watauga, Texas, not far from Dallas/Fort Worth. "In the video, you can see where the meteor is bright enough to illuminate a power pole and trees!"
"The gain control of the camera is slow to recover, so the pole and trees appear illuminated after the fireball is gone," he continues. "The fixed lights in the images are street lights." King notes that the Dallas/Fort Worth area is badly light polluted, yet his camera is doing a good job catching meteors. After the fireball at 1:06 am CDT, he recorded "another more typical meteor 8 minutes later (video), then 2 more during the remainder of the morning."
UPDATE: In Arkansas, astrophographer Brian Emfinger reports: "I have had
my camera shooting all night the last few nights and I have noticed quite a few meteors--
including these two bright ones
on Sept. 16th. The rate is definitely above normal." Tracing the
meteors back to their point of origin reveals a possible radiant on the
outskirts of the constellation Camelopardalis: diagram. Is a shower underway? Sky watchers, please be alert for more
"Camelopardalids" in the nights ahead.
Fox8 News
Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:57
EDT
Was it a meteor, the military or a UFO? A Lexington family is trying to figure out the origin of an unusual light they saw near North Myrtle Beach, S.C. last week.
"It looked like a car light up in the sky," said Tracy House. "It was yellow."
The family first noticed the light September 5 over the Atlantic Ocean.
 |
| ©WGHP |
Josh house and his sister, Tracy called the Coast Guard, thinking someone was stranded... and ran to the water's edge.
The coast guard says it was probably a meteor shower
Even grandfather Buzzy House, the family skeptic, doesn't buy that explanation.
"I don't believe in flying saucers and ghosts and stuff like this," said Buzzy. "I still don't. But I did see the lights."
North Myrtle Beach police told the family the lights were likely
caused by jets from Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, S.C., performing
military maneuvers.
Comment: Wouldn't they have heard the jets?
According to the North Carolina president of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, it could have been something more "interplanetary."
"There is a marked increase in sightings and personally, in my opinion only, I think we're getting ready for some event," said Jim Sutton, MUFON North Carolina president.
"Whether it be UFO's or military, either way, it's interesting to me as to why, who, and what's the whole purpose behind it," said Josh House.
Comment: To watch the home video of the lights go Here.
Tonya Root
myrtlebeachonline.com
Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:53
EDT
What sounded like sonic booms in the North Myrtle Beach area Wednesday night were probably made by fighter jets from Shaw Air Force Base conducting routine training exercises, an official said.
Shaw F-16 pilots are conducting night training this week and were flying off the coast of the Grand Strand between 10:30 p.m. and 11:15 p.m. Wednesday, said Judy Lewis with the public affairs division of Shaw Air Force Base.
The jets are authorized to reach supersonic speeds and cross the sound barrier if they are more than 10,000 feet up and at least 15 miles offshore. When that occurs a boom is often heard if atmosphere conditions are right and allow the sound to travel, Lewis said.
''The sound does carry,'' she said.
Comment: A family saw and recorded strange lights at North Myrtle Beach that night, but no mention of booms in their story.
13abc.com
Fri, 14 Sep 2007 22:03
EDT
People in a part of northwest Ohio now know why their windows shook Thursday morning from what they thought was an explosion.
Turns out it was a sonic boom.
The 180th Fighter Wing confirms that a pilot took an F-16 fighter jet out for a test flight after technicians finished some work on it at Toledo Express Airport. The test required the plane to be throttled up to supersonic speeds, resulting in a boom heard all over Seneca County southeast of Toledo.
Officials with the 180th say when conducting such tests, pilots try to keep the disruptions down by flying to areas not heavily populated.
Comment: This article quotes an Air Force officer, "planes aren't allowed to fly fast enough to create a sonic boom over U.S. land, except over some remote areas."
Itar-Tass
Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:17
EDT
MOSCOW - On the day of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Eduard Tsiolkovsky, the founder of world cosmonautics, scientists meet in Kaluga to discuss matters aimed at protecting the Earth from asteroids.
Alexander Vorobyov, press secretary of the Roscosmos (Russia's Federal Space Agency) has told Itar-Tass that this problem will be one of central subjects of discussion at the 42nd scientific readings on prospects for the development of cosmonautics. The Readings begin in Kaluga, the birth town of the great scientist, on Monday.
The importance of the problem of creating a system for the
protection of the Earth from asteroids is connected with the fact that,
according to estimates by specialists, Asteroid Apophis will fly by the
Earth at a distance of less than 40,000 km in the year 2029, and that
there is a high probability of the asteroid's collision with the Earth
in 2036.
Mystery illness strikes after meteorite hits Peruvian village
AFP
Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:44 EDT
Villagers in southern Peru were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said Monday.
Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.
Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a "strange odor," local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.
Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said.
Rescue teams and experts were dispatched to the scene, where the meteorite left a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) and 20-foot-deep (six-meter-deep) crater, said local official Marco Limache.
"Boiling water started coming out of the crater and particles of rock and cinders were found nearby. Residents are very concerned," he said.
Liubomir Fernandez and Patrick J. McDonnell
Los Angeles
Times
Fri, 21 Sep 2007 07:39 EDT
"Those who say they are affected are
the product of a collective
psychosis," said Jorge Lopez Tejada, health department chief in Puno,
the nearest city.
 |
| ©Los Angeles Times |
CARANCAS, PERU -- -- When she heard the explosion, Isabel Junquilla said, she was sure that war had broken out.
"We thought the Chileans were attacking," Junquilla, 53, recalled
Thursday, referring to Peru's historical rival, Chile. "That's what
everyone was saying. It was very loud."
Townsfolk in this desolate, high-plains hamlet not far from Lake
Tititaca and the Bolivian border received the shock of their lives -- a
meteorite that struck nearby with a thunderous bang just before noon
Saturday, leaving a deep crater, an acrid smell and terrified villagers
and livestock.
The meteorite strike cast a spotlight on this hardscrabble outpost of perhaps 3,000 Indian peasants who live in mud-brick homes and make a living by growing potatoes, herding llamas and raising scraggly cattle.
The incident took on a magical realism feel like something out of a Gabriel García Márquez tale as residents reported strange illnesses and revolting odors, while rumors swirled of a military attack, radiation leak or a celestial rain of gold.
"The day after it fell, we heard this might be worth some money, so we went to pick up everything that was out there," said Eugenio Vilalla, 30. "But there was this terrible smell, really strong, and it gave everyone a headache.
"So the people picked up a few little stones and went home to rest and take a matecito," Villala said, referring to coca-leaf tea, a common cure-all here.
Since then, hundreds have reported maladies, including headaches and nausea. But experts said the reactions probably were imagined. There is no evidence of radiation at the site, officials said.
"Those who say they are affected are the product of a collective psychosis," said Jorge Lopez Tejada, health department chief in Puno, the nearest city.
Authorities took soil and water samples near the crater for analysis.
After days of doubt, they confirmed Thursday that the object was indeed a meteorite -- not volcanic pumice, space junk, or some other Earthly or extraterrestrial phenomenon.
"We're now convinced this was a meteor," said Ronald Woodman, director of the Peruvian Geophysical Institute, which sent a team to the isolated site, about 600 miles southeast of Lima, the capital. "This kind of phenomenon can be dangerous, if it falls on a town, or on a house or person. Fortunately, this wasn't the case."
The object, metallic in nature, created a crater 41 feet in diameter and produced a seismic shock equivalent to a 1.5-magnitude earthquake, Woodman said.
Authorities say the crater was about 16 feet deep.
Experts from Peru's nuclear energy institute estimated that the meteorite was no more than 3 feet in diameter when it smashed into Earth at an extremely high speed.
That piece may have been all that remained of a much larger object that burned up while streaking through Earth's atmosphere, experts said.
The event has drawn worldwide interest, since few objects from outer space make it all the way to Earth's surface.
And it has caused a sensation in this drowsy corner of the Andean altiplano.
"Even before it fell, there was a strong sound, like an airplane," said Marina Llanqui Mamani, 53. "And when it hit, it felt like an earthquake. Everyone was terrified. Even my animals were running all around in fear. Then there was a loud noise and a lot of smoke."
The pungent odor, experts say, could have been caused when the crashing object fused with such elements as sulfur in the soil.
With the danger seemingly past, some here are thinking big: Why not make the whole deal a tourist site, a small museum and side trip for the many visitors headed to Lake Titicaca and Bolivia?
"Now that various experts from Japan and other countries have assured us there is nothing bad, we have decided this belongs to us," said Benito Mosaja Pari, 56, who called himself the village lieutenant governor.
"We're going to dig it out. The scientists tell us this was part of a world that fell apart. It has some value.
"And now it's ours."
patrick.mcdonnell@ latimes.com
Special correspondent Fernandez reported from Carancas and Times staff writer McDonnell from Buenos Aires. Special correspondent Adriana León in Lima contributed to this report.
The Associated Press
Thu, 20 Sep 2007
15:56 EDT
A fiery meteorite crashed into southern Peru over the weekend, experts confirmed on Wednesday, but they remain puzzled over claims it gave off fumes that made 200 people ill.
Local residents told reporters that a fiery ball fell from the sky and smashed into the desolate Andean plain near the Bolivian border Saturday morning.
Jose Mechare, a scientist with Peru's Geological, Mining and Metallurgical Institute, said a geologist had confirmed that it was a "rocky meteorite," based on the fragments analyzed.
He said water in the meteorite's muddy crater boiled for maybe 10 minutes from the heat and could have given off a vapour that made people ill, and scientists were taking water samples.
"We are not completely certain that there was no contamination," Mechare said.
Jorge Lopez, director of the Health Department in the state where the meteorite crashed, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that 200 people suffered headaches, nausea and respiratory problems caused by "toxic" fumes emanating from the crater, which is some 20 metres wide and five metres deep.
But a team of doctors who reached the isolated site said Wednesday they found no evidence the meteorite had sickened people.
Doctors told an Associated Press Television News cameraman at the site that they had found no sign of radioactive contamination among families living nearby. But they said they had taken samples of blood, urine and hair to analyze.
Peasants living near the crater said they had smelled a sulphureous odour for at least an hour after the meteorite struck and that it had provoked upset stomachs and headaches.
But Jose Isisuka, a geologist for the institute who was studying the crater, said he doubted the reports of a sulphureous smell.
Modesto Montoya, a member of the medical team, was quoted by Lima daily El Comercio as saying fear may have provoked psychosomatic ailments.
"When a meteorite falls, it produces horrid sounds when it makes contact with the atmosphere," he told the paper. "It is as if a giant rock is being sanded. Those sounds could have frightened them."
Justina Limache, 74, told El Comercio that when she heard the thunderous roar from the sky, she abandoned her flock of alpacas and ran to her small home with her eight-year-old granddaughter. She said that after the meteorite struck, small rocks rained down on the roof of her house for several minutes and she feared the house was going to collapse.
Meteor expert Ursula Marvin said that if people were sickened, "it wouldn't be the meteorite itself, but the dust it raises."
A meteorite "wouldn't get much gas out of the earth," said Marvin, who has studied the objects since 1961 at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Massachusetts. "It's a very superficial thing."
Three geologists from Peru's Geophysics Institute are expected to report on the incident on Thursday.
Hernando Tavera, a geophysicist at the institute, said similar cases were reported in 2002 and 2004 elsewhere in southern Peru, but were never confirmed as meteorites.
Monte Hayes
AP
Fri, 21 Sep 2007 09:42 EDT
Peruvian astronomers said Thursday that evidence shows a meteorite crashed near Lake Titicaca over the weekend, leaving an elliptical crater and magnetic rock fragments in an impact powerful enough to register on seismic charts.
As other astronomers learned more details, they too said it appears likely that a legitimate meteorite hit Earth on Saturday - an rare occurence.
The Earth is constantly bombarded with objects from outer space, but most burn up in the atmosphere and never reach the planet's surface. Only one in a thousand rocks that that people claim are meteorites turn out to be real, according to Jay Melosh, an expert on impact craters and professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona.
Melosh was skeptical at first, initially calling it a "non-meteorite" and suggesting that the crater might have possibly come from below as a volcanic eruption. Then scientists learned of more details about the crater, as well as witness descriptions of a thunderous roar and a rain of smaller rocks coming down.
"It begins to sound more likely to me that this object could indeed be a meteorite," Melosh said Thursday.
Such impacts are rare, and astronomists still want to do other tests to confirm the strike.
Other details don't add up, they said - such as witness accounts of water in the muddy crater boiling for 10 minutes from the heat. Meteorites are actually cold when they hit Earth, astronomists say, since their outer layers burn up and fall away before impact.
Experts also puzzled over claims that 200 local residents were sickened by fumes from the crater. Doctors who examined them found no evidence of illness related to the meteorite, and one suggested a psychosomatic reaction to the sight and sound of the plunging meteor.
More details emerged when astrophysicist Jose Ishitsuka of Peru's Geophysics Institute reached the site about 6 miles from Lake Titicaca. He confirmed that a meteorite caused a crater 42 feet wide and 15 feet deep, the institute's president, Ronald Woodman, told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Ishitsuka recovered a 3-inch magnetic fragment and said it contained iron, a mineral found in all rocks from space. The impact also registered a magnitude-1.5 tremor on the institute's seismic equipment - that's as much as an explosion of 4.9 tons of dynamite, Woodman said.
Comment: From an earlier AP report:
Jose Mechare, a scientist with Peru's Geological, Mining and Metallurgical Institute, said a geologist had confirmed that it was a "rocky meteorite," based on the fragments analyzed.
So which is it? A "rocky meteorite" or an " iron meteorite"? These conflicting reports only add to the confusion. This probably can't be answered until detailed chemical analysis is done.
Local residents described a fiery ball falling from the sky and smashing into the desolate Andean plain.
Doctors told an Associated Press Television News cameraman at the site that they had found no sign of radioactive contamination among families living nearby. But they said they had taken samples of blood, urine and hair to analyze.
Peasants living near the crater said they had smelled a sulfurous odor for at least an hour after the meteorite struck and that it had provoked upset stomachs and headaches. But Ishitsuka said he doubts reports of a sulfurous smell.
Meteor expert Ursula Marvin said that if people were sickened, "it wouldn't be the meteorite itself, but the dust it raises."
A meteorite "wouldn't get much gas out of the earth," said Marvin, who has studied the objects since 1961 at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Massachusetts. "It's a very superficial thing."
Peter Schultz, a meteor crater specialist at Brown University who is eager to visit the Peruvian site, said the latest details suggest this might be an unusual type of meteor strike, and that given the crater's size, the original meteoroid had to have been at least 10 feet in diameter before breaking up.
"With everything I see reported now, it seems to me like we just got hit," Schultz said.
Justina Limache, 74, told the Lima daily El Comercio that when she heard the thunderous roar from the sky, she abandoned her flock of alpacas and ran home with her 8-year-old granddaughter. She said that after the meteorite struck, small rocks rained down on the roof of her house for several minutes and she feared the house was going to collapse.
Modesto Montoya, a member of the medical team, told El Comercio that fear may have provoked psychosomatic ailments.
"When a meteorite falls, it produces horrid sounds when it makes contact with the atmosphere," he said. "It is as if a giant rock is being sanded. Those sounds could have frightened them."
Associated Press writers Seth Borenstein in Washington and Monte Hayes in Lima contributed to this report.
Dangerous complacency: Dealing with threatening space rocks
ESA
Sun, 23 Sep
2007 08:30 EDT
Every now and then a space rock hits the world's media - sometimes almost literally. Threatening asteroids that zoom past the Earth, fireballs in the sky seen by hundreds of people and mysterious craters which may have been caused by impacting meteorites; all make ESA's studies on the Don Quijote mission look increasingly timely.
The uncertainty surrounding whether a meteorite impacted in South America recently highlights the need to know more about these pieces of natural space debris and their trajectories. ESA has always been interested in such endeavours and conducted a number of studies into how it might best help.
 |
| ©ESA - AOES Medialab |
| The key moment of the Don Quijote mission: the Impactor spacecraft (Hidalgo) smashes into the asteroid while observed, from a safe distance, by the Orbiter spacecraft (Sancho) |
Those studies showed that it is probably the smaller pieces of rock, at most a few hundred metres across, rather than the larger ones that we should be more worried about for the time being. A worldwide network of astronomers is currently cataloguing most of the larger objects, those above 1 km in diameter. A number of survey telescopes have taken up the challenge to detect as many as 90 percent of all near Earth objects down to a size of 140 metres by around 2020. Only after this time will we know whether space-based observatories will be needed to find the rest.
Part of the trouble with these small chunks of rock is fixing their orbits. From the ground, it is very difficult - sometimes impossible - to determine their trajectory with enough precision to rule out impacts with our planet in the years to come. So, ESA have been concentrating on a mission concept to actually 'mark a cross' on small asteroids and check the state of the art of our technology. The Don Quijote studies propose a two phases. In the first phase, a spacecraft would rendezvous with an asteroid and go into orbit around it. It would monitor the asteroid for several months, precisely determining its position, shape, mass and gravity field.
 |
| ©AFP PHOTO/ANDINA/HO |
| People in southern Peru gaze at a crater made apparently by a meteorite 17 September 2007 in the department of Puno. Villagers were struck by a mysterious illness after the meteorite crashed to Earth in their area, regional authorities said Monday. Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia. Residents complained of headaches and vomiting. |
In the second phase, another spacecraft would slam into the asteroid at a speed of around 10 km/s, while the first spacecraft watches, looking for any changes in the asteroid's trajectory. In this way, a mission involving two spacecraft would attempt to be the first to actually move an asteroid - and be able to measure it.
In preparation for dealing with small asteroids, ESA's Don Quijote studies also propose to start small. In its current design, the first spacecraft, Sancho, could reach any one of 5 or 6 small, nearby asteroids. Each one is no larger than a few hundred metres in diameter. At present, the mission planners have chosen to concentrate on Apophis, a small asteroid that can swing dangerously close to Earth on the outwards stretch of its orbit around the Sun.
Don Quijote is currently a candidate concept in ESA's In-Orbit Demosntration scheme. If it becomes a reality, Don Quijote could launch sometime early in the next decade. Sancho would take some 25 months to reach its target. Once there, it would begin its groundbreaking study - both literally and metaphorically.
 |
| ©ESA - AOES Medialab |
| The
Don Quijote mission under study is based on two phases. In the first
phase a spacecraft (Sanchez) would rendezvous with an asteroid and go
into orbit around it, monitoring it for several months. In the second
phase another spacecraft would slam into the asteroid, while the first
spacecraft watches, looking for any changes in the asteroid's
trajectory.
If it becomes a reality, Don Quijote would launch sometime early in the next decade. |
"The idea is to get the technology ready before you really need it," says Ian Carnelli, Technical Officer for the Don Quijote studies at ESA's General Studies Programme. "The studies carried out so far set the right context for the investigation of a small mission based on a highly autonomous interplanetary minisatellite, which will demonstrate key technologies required in the future by the Don Quijote mission" says Frederic Teston, Head of ESA's Systems and Engineering Support Division, that is now taking up the assessment work.
In 1908, a 20-metre asteroid impacted the uninhabited Tunguska
forest in Siberia, toppling trees and causing total devastation over an
area of two thousand square kilometres. Scientists predict this type of
event to occur about every 150 years. Next year's 100th anniversary of
that impact will be yet another reminder of the need to learn about and
become ready to deal with asteroids - even the small ones.
Jason Mick
Daily Tech
Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:17
EDT
The cause of illness from meteorite impact was discovered to be decidedly not out-of-this-world.
A significant cosmic event occurred when a massive meteor struck on September 15th outside the farming village of Carancas, near Lake Titicaca. The meteor created an imposing eight meter (26-foot) deep, 20 meter (65 foot) wide crater. Almost immediately the object was ruled to be a meteor and not something of terrestial origin.
The massive crater emitted strange fumes, which made over 30 villagers violently ill, with headaches and nausea. Reports on the exact number of victims ranged from 30 to "about 200." Speculations on possible "out-of-this-world" causes were rampant.
Police blocked off the crater, and the villagers were transported to hospitals.
The director of the health ministry in the Puno region, Jorge Lopez, said none of the patients was in serious condition but that they would have to undergo blood and neurological tests as a precaution in three to six months.
Now, a team of Peruvian researchers have determined the true cause -- ground water tainted with arsenic.
The villagers' reactions were the result of inhaling arsenic fumes, according to Luisa Macedo, a researcher for Peru's Mining, Metallurgy, and Geology Institute (INGEMMET), who visited the crash site.
Peru's soil is rich in arsenic deposits and when the meteor hit, columns of steam were created by the heat from the meteor. This steam bore particles of arsenic, causing the various afflictions.
Villagers described the event as a terrifying experience as they observed the massive flaming ball of rock hurtled at high speed from the skies and the impact scattered debris over a wide radius. Debris landed on the roof of the closest house, 390 feet from the crater, but no fires were reported to be caused by the debris.
The medical mystery of the meteor and its solution goes to show that there are practical explanations for many "out-of-this-world" phenomena. The event also was a significant cosmological event, as it marks one of the largest meteor impacts in recent years. For now, the people of Carancas, probably just want to never see another meteorite again.
Scott Chirstiansen
Kodiak Daily Mirror
Wed, 26 Sep 2007 01:03
EDT
Several Kodiakans saw something fall from the sky Tuesday morning that may have landed in mountainous terrain on Kodiak Island. The incident prompted 911 calls and a helicopter search was launched from U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak, but no crash site was found.
The pre-dawn lightshow happened about 6:45 a.m. and could be seen from several places on Kodiak Island. Some witnesses described a light moving across the sky toward the Gulf of Alaska. Others saw an explosion and red tracers. The light was bright enough to be seen from Kodiak city and Chiniak, about 20 miles away across Chiniak Bay.
Alaska State Troopers also reported sightings at about the same time on the Kenai Peninsula.
"We got to watch it for a few seconds before it went behind the mountains," Jenny Horning said, "I saw a ball of red with streamers of red flames behind it."
Horning and her son Drew saw the light while driving to Kodiak from their home on Anton Larsen Road. She said they were convinced they had just seen an aircraft crash in the mountains above the road. She drove over the road's summit to where she could get a cell phone connection and placed a 911 call.
About 20 miles away in Chiniak, Jan Pennington saw a light outside her window. It was so bright, Pennington said, she at first thought it might be a helicopter searchlight. Pennington didn't hear rotors though and believes she caught a glimpse of a very bright meteor.
"It was traveling west to east and went behind a tree," Pennington said.
Kodiak Police Chief T.C. Kamai saw the light while on his way home from a morning workout.
"I was headed home from the gym and I saw flashes in the sky that looked like lightning, and I was trying to figure out what it was," Kamai said.
Kodiak police dispatch contacted fire departments on the Coast Guard Base and in Womens Bay.
Rescue workers assembled at a mountain chalet on Anton Larsen Road while a Coast Guard HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter focused on an area north of the road where witnesses directed the search. The flights turned up nothing.
"They did a low-altitude flyover, looking for any signs of fire or pitting. Then they did a higher-altitude flyover and they still did not see anything," Petty Officer 3rd Class Richard Brahm, a Coast Guard spokesman, said.
No emergency distress signals were received that coincided with the sightings, Brahm said.
Kamai said authorities have accounted for Kodiak-based aircraft and known flight plans in the area.
Alaska State Troopers went further, trying to confirm from space agencies if a satellite had gone missing, trooper spokeswoman Beth Ipsen said. Ipsen said troopers in Kodiak specifically contacted authorities in charge of YES-2, an experimental satellite that reportedly malfunctioned.
"We do not have anyone saying they have a missing satellite, but that doesn't mean there is not one out there," Ipsen said. "It is still a mystery, but the good thing is that we know it is not a plane," she said.
Cosmic blast may have killed off megafauna
Colin Nickerson
Boston Globe
Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:20
EDT
Wooly mammoths, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, and dozens of other species of megafauna may have become extinct when a disintegrating comet or asteroid exploded over North America with the force of millions of hydrogen bombs, according to research by an international team of scientists.
The blast, which the researchers believe occurred 12,900 years ago, may have also doomed a mysterious early human culture, known as Clovis people, while triggering a planetwide cool-down that wiped out the plant species that sustained many outsize Ice Age beasts, according to research published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists have long speculated that an impact from a comet or asteroid may have wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
But the notion of an extraterrestrial object wreaking such havoc during human times is a bit unnerving even to researchers.
"What is sobering about this theory of ours is that this impact would be so recent," Peter H. Schultz, a Brown University planetary geologist who participated in the research, was quoted in a release from the university. "Not so long ago, something may have fallen from the sky and profoundly changed our climate and our culture."
The object, with a girth estimated to be 3 miles, appears to have exploded high above present-day Canada with such fury that detritus was spread from California to Belgium. The height of the blast and the cushioning effect of the ice layers that still covered the region would explain the lack of an immense crater.
"The comet may have broken up into small pieces as it neared the earth, and these pieces detonated in various places above North America and northern Europe," Ted Bunch, professor of geology at Northern Arizona University and a retired NASA researcher who specializes in extraterrestrial impact research, said in an interview.
The cataclysm occurred at the end of the Pleistocene era, when an array of fantastic mammals and birds - including camels, tapirs, and a condor with a 16-foot wingspan - shared North America with Clovis people, hunter-gatherers known for their distinctive stone spearheads.
"The detonation may have fried them or the shock wave would have compressed them," said Bunch, one of the authors of the paper, referring to creatures directly exposed to the blast. "Others would have been wiped out in massive fires and floods."
Indeed, fossil records of some of the most exotic beasts associated with the era, along with Clovis culture, abruptly disappear with a dark layer of dirt called "black mat." The mat was formed by algae-rich water containing soot and other remnants of burned material, according to the research.
Just beneath the black mat layer, scientists found high concentrations of magnetic grains holding iridium, charcoal, soot, carbon spherules, and "glass-like carbon." Also found were tiny diamonds, known as nanodiamonds, and extraterrestrial helium.
"Nanodiamonds are formed only by the kind of incredible pressures you'd get from an extraterrestrial object slamming into earth," Bunch said. "The other material, especially the helium, also strongly suggests [something] extraterrestrial," most likely a comet or "low-density, carbon-rich" asteroid.
The soot is indicative of immense fires that roared across North America, fanned by "hurricane-force winds," according to the scientists.
The research, led by Richard Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, is likely to fan controversy among scientists. That is partly because it flies in the face of recent research suggesting that North America's big mammals were hunted to extinction by early humans, but mainly because the paper argues that the comet's impact triggered a planetwide big chill, the so-called Younger Dryas cool-down, that lasted 1,000 years.
"This is fascinating research when it comes to the mass extinctions. They really seem on to something," said Jeffrey P. Severinghaus, a geochemist and expert in prehistoric climatology with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. "I can imagine this sort of impact causing a cool-down of five years or 10 years, but 1,000 years - well, I'm skeptical. I don't think they have given good evidence for that."
The research will be the subject of a National Geographic Channel documentary on Oct. 7 at 10 p.m.
Comment: For more on this catastrophe, see the article Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction!
The recent crater in Peru may well be the first of many impacts we'll be seeing over the next few years. We may be on our way to going the way of the wooly mammoth.
Malaysia Sun
Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:30
EDT
Extraterrestrial impact possibly wiped out all life forms on Earth during the Ice Age, a new study by a team of international researchers, including two Northern Arizona University geologists, has revealed.
What caused the extinction of mammoths and the decline of Stone Age people about 13,000 years ago remains hotly debated. Overhunting by Paleoindians, climate change and disease lead the list of probable causes.
But now, a new study has reported evidence of a comet or low-density object barrelling toward Earth, exploding in the upper atmosphere and triggering a devastating swath that wiped out most of the large animals, their habitat and humans of that period.
"The detonation either fried them or compressed them because of the shock wave. It was a mini nuclear winter," said Ted Bunch, NAU adjunct professor of geology and former NASA researcher who specializes in impact craters.
Till date, no one has found a giant crater in the Earth that could attest to such a cataclysmic impact 13,000 years ago.
But the research team has offered evidence of a comet, two and a half to three miles in diameter, that detonated 30 to 60 miles above the earth, triggering a massive shockwave, firestorms and a subsequent drastic cooling effect across most of North America and northern Europe.
"The comet may have broken up into smaller pieces as it neared the Earth and then these pieces detonated in various places above two continents," Bunch said.
They said the evidence for multiple detonations came from a four-inch-thick "black mat" of carbon-rich material that appears as far north as Canada, Greenland and Europe to as far south as the Channel Islands off the coast of California and eastward to the Carolinas.
Two sites still exist in Arizona at Murray Springs and Lehner Ranch, both near Sierra Vista, they said.
They said evidence of mammoths and other megafauna and early human hunters, known as the Clovis culture, are found beneath the black mat but are missing entirely within or above it.
The team believes this is clinching evidence to prove that an extraterrestrial impact wiped out many of the inhabitants of the Late Pleistocene period.
The researchers said the black mat was formed by bonding of water and algal blooms and contains carbon, soot and glassy carbon - remnants of burned materials, adding that some of these remnants are extraterrestrial in nature.
The team has identified fullerenes, spherical carbon cages resembling a soccer ball, which are formed in shock events outside the Earth's atmosphere. Trapped inside the fullerenes is a concentration of helium 3 that is many times greater than what is found in the Earth's atmosphere.
Scientists say the black mat has also turned up nanodiamonds, which are formed in the interstellar medium outside the solar system, by or by a high-explosive detonation.
"Either these things came in with the impactor or they were made during impact detonation. We have no other explanation for their presence," Bunch said.
Bunch said the magnitude of the detonations would have been huge.
"A hydrogen bomb is the equivalent of about 100 to 1,000 megatons. The detonations we're talking about would be about 10 million megatons. That's larger than the simultaneous detonation of all the world's nuclear bombs past and present," said Bunch.
The team says the detonations destabilized a vast ice sheet, known as the Laurentide Ice Sheet, that covered most of what was then Canada and the northern US.
Heat from the detonation and firestorms would have melted much of the ice sheet, releasing water vapour into the atmosphere. The result was rapid cooling of about eight degrees over the next 100 years. The melting of the ice sheet and subsequent climate change would explain the water-based nature of the black mat," Bunch added.
The study appears online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Ker Than
Space.com
Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:53 EDT
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has spotted an unusual comet that flies around the sun at regular intervals.
 |
| ©Space.com |
Dubbed P/2007 R5 (SOHO), the object belongs to a rare class of comets called periodic comets. Only 190 of the thousands of known comets are periodic. The most famous periodic comet is Halley's Comet, which can be seen from Earth every 76 years and last passed close to the sun in 1986.
While many of SOHO's 1,350 detected comets are suspected of being periodic, this is the first one conclusively proven and declared as such. The new comet has a much smaller orbit than Halley, taking only about four years to travel once around the sun. It was first seen in September 1999, and then again in September 2003. In 2005, Ph.D. student Sebastian Hoenig at the Max-Planck-Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn, Germany, speculated the two comets were actually the same object.
 |
| ©Unknown |
Hoenig's realization is similar to the one made by English astronomer Edmond Halley, who in 1682 connected a comet he saw to two previous comets observed in 1531 and 1607.
To test his idea, Hoenig calculated a combined orbit for the comet and predicted it would return on Sept. 11, 2007. The comet appeared right on schedule.
P/2007 R5 (SOHO) is estimated to be about 330 to 650 feet (100 to 200 meters) in diameter. Unlike most comets, it does not have a tail or a glowing halo, called a coma, of dust and gas around its head. But as it passed within about 5 billion miles (7.9 million kilometers) of the sun, the comet brightened by a factor of a million - a common behavior for a comet.
"It is quite possibly an extinct comet nucleus of some kind," said Karl Battams, who runs SOHO's comet discovery program. Extinct comets are those that have expelled most of their volatile ice, leaving little material to form a tail or coma.
P/2007 R5 (SOHO) is expected to return in September 2011. SOHO is a joint mission run by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
Marcia Duncan
AP
Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:02
EDT
NASA is about to embark on an unprecedented asteroid-belt mission
with a spacecraft aptly named Dawn. The 3 billion-mile, eight-year
journey to probe the earliest stages of the solar system will begin
with liftoff, planned for just after sunrise Thursday. Rain is
forecast, however, and could force a delay.
Scientists have been waiting for Dawn to rise since July, when the mission was put off because of the more pressing need to launch NASA's latest Mars lander, the Phoenix. Once Phoenix rocketed away in August, that cleared the way for Dawn.
"For the people in the Bahamas, on the 27th will be one day where they can say that Dawn will rise in the west," said a smiling Keyur Patel, project manager from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Dawn will travel to the two biggest bodies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter - rocky Vesta and icy Ceres from the planet-forming period of the solar system.
Ceres is so big - as wide as Texas - that it's been reclassified a dwarf planet. The spacecraft will spend a year orbiting Vesta, about the length of Arizona, from 2011 to 2012, then fly to Ceres and circle there in 2015.
Dawn's three science instruments - a camera, infrared spectrometer, and gamma ray and neutron detector - will explore Vesta and Ceres from varying altitudes.
"In my view, we're going to be visiting some of the last unexplored worlds in the inner solar system," chief engineer Marc Rayman said Tuesday.
Because Vesta and Ceres are so different, researchers want to compare their evolutionary paths.
No one has ever attempted before to send a spacecraft to two celestial bodies and orbit both of them. It's possible now because of the revolutionary ion engines that will propel Dawn through the cosmos.
Dawn is equipped with three ion-propulsion thrusters. Xenon gas will be bombarded with electrons, and the resulting ions will be accelerated out into space, gently shoving the spacecraft forward at increasingly higher speeds.
"It really does emit this cool blue glow like in the science fiction movies," Rayman said.
NASA tested an ion engine aboard its Deep Space 1 craft, which was launched in 1998. Ion engines have been used on only about five dozen spacecraft, mostly commercial satellites.
Dawn also has two massive solar wings, nearly 65 feet from tip to tip, to generate power as it ventures farther from the sun. Ceres is about three times farther from the sun than Earth.
NASA put the cost of the mission at $357 million, but said that does not include the Delta II rocket. Officials refused Tuesday to provide the cost of the rocket, saying that was proprietary information.
Northern Arizona University
Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:45
EDT
What caused the extinction of mammoths and the decline of Stone Age people about 13,000 years ago remains hotly debated. Overhunting by Paleoindians, climate change and disease lead the list of probable causes. But an idea once considered a little out there is now hitting closer to home.
A team of international researchers, including two Northern Arizona University geologists, reports evidence that a comet or low-density object barreling toward Earth exploded in the upper atmosphere and triggered a devastating swath of destruction that wiped out most of the large animals, their habitat and humans of that period.
 |
| ©Jim Wittke |
| A colorized scanning electron microscope image of a glassy carbon sphere that contains evidence of extraterrestrial impact. The sphere measures about .012 inches in width. |
"The detonation either fried them or compressed them because of the shock wave," said Ted Bunch, NAU adjunct professor of geology and former NASA researcher who specializes in impact craters. "It was a mini nuclear winter."
Bunch and Jim Wittke, a geologic materials analyst at NAU, are co-authors of the paper, which fingers an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago for the mass extinctions at the end of the Ice Age. The paper was just released online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research team includes several members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and researchers from Hungary and the Netherlands.
No one has found a giant crater in the Earth that could attest to such a cataclysmic impact 13,000 years ago, but the research team offers evidence of a comet, two and a half to three miles in diameter, that detonated 30 to 60 miles above the earth, triggering a massive shockwave, firestorms and a subsequent drastic cooling effect across most of North America and northern Europe.
 |
| ©Jerry Foreman |
| Ted Bunch of the Northern Arizona University geology department is a member of an international team that has found evidence of an extraterrestrial impact that may have wiped out the mammoths and other Ice Age species. |
"The comet may have broken up into smaller pieces as it neared the Earth and then these pieces detonated in various places above two continents," Bunch said.
The evidence for multiple detonations comes from a four-inch-thick "black mat" of carbon-rich material that appears as far north as Canada, Greenland and Europe to as far south as the Channel Islands off the coast of California and eastward to the Carolinas. Two sites exist in Arizona at Murray Springs and Lehner Ranch, both near Sierra Vista.
Evidence of mammoths and other megafauna and early human hunters, known as the Clovis culture, are found beneath the black mat but are missing entirely within or above it. This led the research team to conclude an extraterrestrial impact wiped out many of the inhabitants of the Late Pleistocene. Bunch notes that some animals may have survived in protected niches.
The black mat was formed by ponding of water and algal blooms and contains carbon, soot and glassy carbon - remnants of burned materials. Some of these remnants are extraterrestrial in nature. For example, the research team has identified fullerenes, spherical carbon cages resembling a soccer ball, which are formed in shock events outside the Earth's atmosphere. Trapped inside the fullerenes is a concentration of helium 3 that is many times greater than what is found in the Earth's atmosphere.
The black mat also has turned up nanodiamonds, which are formed in the interstellar medium outside the solar system, by or by a high-explosive detonation.
"Either these things came in with the impactor or they were made during impact detonation. We have no other explanation for their presence," Bunch said.
The magnitude of the detonations would have been huge.
"A hydrogen bomb is the equivalent of about 100 to 1,000 megatons," Bunch said. "The detonations we're talking about would be about 10 million megatons. That's larger than the simultaneous detonation of all the world's nuclear bombs past and present."
The research team believes the detonations destabilized a vast ice sheet, known as the Laurentide Ice Sheet, that covered most of what was then Canada and the northern United States. Heat from the detonation and firestorms would have melted much of the ice sheet, releasing water vapor into the atmosphere.
"The result was rapid cooling of about eight degrees over the next 100 years," Bunch said. The melting of the ice sheet and subsequent climate change would explain the water-based nature of the black mat.
Catastrophic extraterrestrial impacts are not new. Scientists theorize a much larger asteroid impact annihilated the dinosaurs and about 85 percent of the Earth's biomass about 65 million years ago. The most recent incident, known as the Tunguska event, occurred in 1908 in Russia. The Tunguska explosion was an airburst of a comet or meteorite estimated at 10-15-megatons that destroyed tens of millions of trees across more than 800 square miles.
Bunch says impact airbursts may be more common than previously thought with possibly two or three such events having occurred over the last 100,000 years. And more are sure to follow.
NOTE: The work by an international team of researchers that points to a comet or low-density asteroid as the cause of the massive Ice Age extinctions has attracted widespread attention. The National Geographic Channel, which was on campus in May to film Northern Arizona University's Ted Bunch and Jim Wittke, will air a documentary on the research on Sunday, Oct. 7, at 10 p.m. EST. Discover magazine cited Bunch in an article on "The Great American Extinction" that appeared in the August issue.
Jeff Hecht
New Scientist
Fri, 28 Sep 2007 08:11 EDT
Speculation raged about what caused the crater, found in the Peruvian town of Carancas, near the Bolivian border, with a hydrothermal explosion of gas and even a downed spy satellite offered up as culprits.
 |
| ©Lionel Jackson/Geological Survey of Canada |
| Ground water quickly filled the crater created by the meteorite impact |
"The mysterious gases were steam. It was a rock that fell out of the sky and made a hole in the ground. End of Story," says Lionel Jackson of the Geological Survey of Canada in Vancouver. But some questions still remain.
The meteorite came from the north-northeast and was bright enough as it streaked over the city of Desaguadero - which lies 20 kilometres north of Carancas - that many residents there clearly saw it at 1145 local time. Witnesses did not see the fireball break up in the air, but people up to 20 kilometres from the crater reported hearing an explosion - presumably the impact. Windows were shattered at the local health center a kilometre from the impact site.
The space rock hit a region of soft red soil a few metres thick at an elevation of 3.8 kilometres in an area that had been covered by Lake Titicaca during the ice age. A report by Luisa Macedo and José Macharé of the Peruvian Institute for Geology, Mining and Metallurgy describes a crater measuring 13.3 by 13.8 metres, with a rim a metre above the original soil level.
'Confused and contradictory'
Ground water quickly filled the crater, and witnesses reported that it was boiling. By the time Macedo arrived 36 hours later, she saw "turbid brown" water reaching to within a metre of the original soil level. The crater looks like it was formed in water-saturated soil, says Peter Schultz of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, US.
Meteor fragments found at the site were "fine-grained, light grey, fragile rocky material, with disseminated iron [particles] of one-millimetre diameter", Macedo and Macharé report. Thin sections showed tiny silicate spheres found in many meteorites, confirming the rocks came from space.
"The reports about this 'impact' have been confused, contradictory and muddled," says Don Yeomans of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US. "[This] report is by far the best I've seen."
The Peruvians also reported that early claims of 200 people sickened by the impact were exaggerated. They found only about 30 complaints of ailments such as headaches and nausea, but could not identify a cause. Jackson suspects the victims were simply stunned by "a big explosion in a very quiet area of the world".
 |
| ©Lionel Jackson/Geological Survey of Canada |
| A house near the crater was struck by ejecta from the impact |
Boiling point
Geologists are still puzzling over some details. The fragments looks like stony meteorites, but that type normally breaks apart in the air, and local witnesses saw only a single object. The size of the object that hit also remains unclear - estimates range from the size of a basketball to a few metres across.
"This is probably a fragment from a breakup of a larger object, which broke up at an approximate altitude of 50 kilometres," Yeomans told New Scientist. "One would expect a three-metre (original size perhaps) meteorite to hit the Earth's atmosphere a few times each year and sometimes a fragment makes it to the ground."
The speed and temperature of the object also remain a puzzle. Witnesses reported that the crater steamed for half an hour after impact. "It makes no sense that the water was actually boiling," says Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US.
Although a meteorite's surface layer may burn off in the atmosphere, its interior normally remains at the cold temperatures of outer space. The crash site's high altitude reduces the boiling point of water, but only by a little over 10° Celsius.
 |
| ©Lionel Jackson/Geological Survey of Canada |
| The meteorite came from the north-northeast and was bright enough to be seen in the middle of the day by residents of the city of Desaguadero |
Jackson thinks the kinetic energy of impact could have generated the heat, and is trying to find seismic records of the crash. Schultz says the heat and bubbling might have come from air trapped and heated on the "front" of the meteorite as it sped through the air.
YLE
Sat, 29 Sep 2007 16:39 EDT
Finland's biggest astronomical association, Ursa, says that a light phenomenon seen over much of northern and eastern Finland on Friday night was a meteor -- the brightest seen in the country in more than 30 years.
 |
| ©YLE |
| The apparent superbolide seen over Finland late Friday was many times brighter than these average meteors. |
The editor of the organization's journal, Marko Pekkola, says it was a superbolide, a fireball more than 100 times brighter than a full moon.
The fireball was apparently caused by a space rock striking the atmosphere over Northern Ostrobothnia and then exploding over Finland. Ursa says the rock may have weighed some 200 kilogrammes. However it was not clear on Saturday whether any meteorites fell to the ground.
The dazzling 'shooting star' spurred worried telephone calls to emergency centres in various parts of Finnish Lapland, as far apart as Kemi, Enontekiö and Ivalo.
Space Daily
Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:43
EDT
Moffet Field, California - Every now and then a space rock hits the world's media - sometimes almost literally. Threatening asteroids that zoom past the Earth, fireballs in the sky seen by hundreds of people and mysterious craters which may have been caused by impacting meteorites; all make ESA's planned mission Don Quijote look increasingly timely. Asteroid and comet impacts have played an important role in the history of life on Earth.
 |
| ©NASA |
| Artist's depiction of the Chicxulub impact crater. The total number today of objects a kilometer in diameter or larger, a size that could cause a similar global catastrophe upon Earth impact, is now estimated to range between 900 and 1,230 |
Such objects may have benefited life's evolution by delivering important precursor molecules to the early Earth. However, asteroid impacts may also be responsible for some of the most catastrophic mass extinctions in history. If a large impact happened today, it could have severe implications for the future of our planet's biosphere.
The uncertainty surrounding whether a meteorite impacted in South America recently highlights the need to know more about these pieces of natural space debris and their trajectories. ESA has always been interested in such endeavours and conducted a number of studies into how it might best help.
Those studies showed that it is probably the smaller pieces of rock, at most a few hundred meters across, rather than the larger ones that we should be more worried about for the time being. A worldwide network of astronomers is currently cataloging most of the larger objects, those above 1 km in diameter. A number of survey telescopes have taken up the challenge to detect as many as 90 percent of all near Earth objects down to a size of 140 meters by around 2020. Only after this time will we know whether space-based observatories will be needed to find the rest.
Part of the trouble with these small chunks of rock is fixing their orbits. From the ground, it is very difficult - sometimes impossible - to determine their trajectory with enough precision to rule out impacts with our planet in the years to come. So, ESA have been concentrating on a mission to actually 'mark a cross' on small asteroids and check the state of the art of our technology. The Don Quijote mission is a project based on two phases. In the first phase, a spacecraft would rendezvous with an asteroid and go into orbit around it. It would monitor the asteroid for several months, precisely determining its position, shape, mass and gravity field.
In the second phase, another spacecraft would slam into the asteroid at a speed of around 10 km/s, while the first spacecraft watches, looking for any changes in the asteroid's trajectory. In this way, a mission involving two spacecraft would attempt to be the first to actually move an asteroid.
In preparation for dealing with small asteroids, ESA's Don Quijote is also starting small. In its current design, the first spacecraft, Sancho, could reach any one of 5 or 6 small, nearby asteroids. Each one is no larger than a few hundred meters in diameter. At present, the mission planners have chosen to concentrate on Apophis, a small asteroid that can swing dangerously close to Earth on the outwards stretch of its orbit around the Sun.
If it becomes a reality, Don Quijote could launch sometime early in the next decade. Sancho would take some 25 months to reach its target. Once there, it would begin its groundbreaking study - both literally and metaphorically.
"The idea is to get the technology ready before you really need it," says Ian Carnelli, Technical Officer for the Don Quijote mission at ESA.
In 1908, a 20-meter asteroid impacted the uninhabited Tunguska forest in Siberia, toppling trees and causing total devastation over an area of two thousand square kilometers. Scientists predict this type of event to occur about every 150 years. Next year's 100th anniversary of that impact will be yet another reminder of the need to learn about and become ready to deal with asteroids - even the small ones.
Mario Xuereb
The Age
Wed, 03 Oct 2007 12:23 EDT
A GREEN-HUED meteor lit up the sky above Victoria last night, prompting calls to emergency services and astronomical groups.
Reports of the meteor, which appeared at about 9.55pm, came from the state's north-east, suburbs across Melbourne and even towns in South Australia.
Witnesses reported a green, round light moving southwards in the eastern sky, leaving a burnt copper-like trail lasting several seconds.
Perry Vlahos, vice-president of the Astronomical Society of Victoria, said it was a rare but not unusual event. "It happens a number of times a year, but it's just a matter of looking up at the right time."
He said the meteor was most likely space debris the size of a tennis ball swept up in the Earth's atmosphere.
Georgie Pilcher
The Herald Sun
Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:00
EDT
The Herald Sun phones rang hot last night with reports of a UFO sighting in Melbourne.
People from Lilydale to Mt Eliza and Richmond to St Albans called about 9.45pm to say they had seen an amazing bright blue light in the sky with a long blue trail.
Perry Vlahos from the Astronomical Society of Victoria confirmed it was in fact a meteor or Bollide burning up in the atmosphere.
The meteor had entered the atmosphere over north-east Victoria and travelled towards South Australia.
"As the Earth moves around the sun in its orbit it sweeps up this sort of material every day. However, not much is larger than a grain of sand. This one however was bigger, probably the size of a tennis ball," he said.
The meteor was moving up to 72km a second.
Tom Ford
Star Tribune
Thu, 04 Oct 2007 09:33
EDT
The blazing orange and yellow fireball that Minnesotans reported seeing flash through Wednesday afternoon's clear blue sky was probably a meteor.
And State Patrol officials are confident that the potential meteor did not transmogrify into a wood pallet that caused a minor disruption to drivers in Rogers. "It fell off a vehicle," patrol spokesman Mark Peterson said of the pallet, which was soon removed from Interstate 94 near Highway 101.
Somehow, early reports connected the highway debris to the natural firework show. Not "unless aliens are using pallets to drop on us," Peterson said with a laugh.
Though sightings were reported from southwestern Minnesota to western Wisconsin around after 2 p.m., it's unlikely that there could be any definitive ruling that the object was a meteor, experts said.
"There are a couple hundred tons of stuff that fall on the Earth every day," said Bob Gehrz, who heads the university's Astronomy Department.
Because there are so many meteors regularly breaking into the atmosphere, often unnoticed given that some are the size of grains of sand, the activity is not comprehensively tracked, Gehrz said.
While people have discovered remnants of meteorites that struck the region centuries to millenniums ago, university physics Prof. Bob Pepin said he is not aware of anyone who's seen one land in the area.
If the object was indeed a meteor, given how bright it appeared in the middle of the day, it probably was at least the size of a pea, Gehrz said.
Comment: A pea??? Well he certainly hasn't exaggerated there!
Those who saw the object included a man in Chanhassen who was looking out his dentist's window, a downtown Minneapolis law firm employee who followed the object until it was obscured by a nearby skyscraper and an oil refinery worker in Rosemount who had a hard time convincing his co-workers that he saw what he saw.
It's possible the meteor disintegrated above a field a mile or so west of Hudson, according to DJ Vail of St. Paul. After a visit to her St. Croix River-side home, she was driving back into Minnesota along Interstate 94 after 2 p.m. when she spotted the fireball , she said. As it fell closer to the ground near a highway rest stop, it suddenly flamed out. Her sighting lasted just seconds.
Since she had already driven by the exit to the rest stop, she decided not to get off the road to explore further, she said.
"Nobody's going to believe me," she also recalled thinking.
Living in Peru
Wed, 03 Oct 2007 09:13 EDT
Peru's official government news agency reported yesterday that the crater where a meteorite fell in Puno, Peru was being guarded by 20 of Peru's National Police officers.
Chief of the police station, Major Victor Anaya stated that the officers had been placed near the meteorite landing site to keep a group of U.S. citizens from trafficking pieces of the meteorite.
Comment: It seems strange to call it a meteorite landing site, but that could be a translation issue.
On Monday October 1, Ronald Woodman, the president of Peru's Geophysics Institute (IGP) claimed that a group of U.S. citizens, led by Michael Farmer, were attempting to traffic pieces of the meteorite.
Woodman stated that Farmer was a known meteorite hunter that searched for meteorites around the world and sold them to collectors. He stated, "They planned to start digging today and take them out of the country. This is worth money, and they are taking them to sell them not to study them."
The Geophysics president expressed his discontent with respect to the team led by Farmer. He stated that they were taking advantage of the townspeoples' ignorance, stating that the meteorite was worth much more than what they were paying.
Anaya reported that police had searched for the meteorite hunters at
their hotel but were unable to catch them because they had left. He
explained that the U.S. citizens had urged the townspeople to collect
samples, causing some of them to attempt to drain the water from the
crater.
Mirror mirror in the sky, save us from asteroids flashing by
Fiona Macleod
Scotsman.com News
Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:35
EDT
A network of mirrors harnessing the destructive power of the sun might save the world from disaster, space experts believe.
If an asteroid should be discovered on a catastrophic collision course with our planet, researchers at Glasgow University say mirrors are the best way to save us from annihilation.
Up to 5,000 could be used to focus sunlight on to the asteroid, melting the rock and altering its orbital path away from the Earth.
The doomsday scheme was devised after a team at the university compared nine methods of deflecting near-Earth objects - asteroids and comets. The results were unveiled at the Jodrell Bank observatory in Cheshire as part of celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1, which marked the start of the space age.
The research team compared the mirror technique with eight others, including different types of nuclear explosion and fixing a propulsion system to the asteroid.
The nuclear options and the mirrors would be more effective than the
others, but scientists fear the risk of flying debris from a nuclear
blast.
The orbiting mirrors would be used to focus sunlight on an area of
the asteroid between 0.5 and 1.5 metres wide, heating the rock to
around 2,100C - hot enough to melt the surface of the asteroid and
create a thrust which would nudge it off course.
The team found that the orbit of an asteroid measuring 150 metres across could be sufficiently modified by a network of 100 mirrors in a few days. For an asteroid the size of the one believed to have wiped out Earth's dinosaurs, a 5,000-strong fleet of spacecraft would need to focus a beam of sunlight on the surface for three or more years.
Dr Massimiliano Vasile, who led the project, said the research was not science fiction but facing up to science fact. He said: "Asteroid impacts are a real threat. The Tunguska explosion in 1908 devastated an area bigger than Greater London. With only ten spacecraft flying in formation, each with a 20 metre mirror, we could deflect a similar-size asteroid into a safe orbit in about six months.
"This technology is genuinely feasible and, unlike methods where an explosion or impacter is used to divert the asteroid, there is no further risk from fragments. We have estimated, for a ten-satellite formation, a launch mass for each individual spacecraft of around 500kg.
"This is a smaller and lighter satellite constellation than, say, the Galileo positioning system, so is well within our launch capabilities."
Pieces of rock and ice enter our atmosphere every day, but most are so small that they go largely unnoticed.
Scientists have calculated that every 26-30 million years, a
10km-sized asteroid (the size of the one believed to have wiped out the
dinosaurs) strikes the Earth.
Race against time to save the globe
Alternative methods of saving the world from an asteroid were examined but rejected.
- Different types of nuclear explosion were considered but the fragmentation of the resulting debris made this too aggressive a method, not to mention the dangers associated with nuclear power.
- Another option was to fix an electric propulsion system to the asteroid, but this would take too much time to complete before the asteroid impacted with the earth.
- A mass-driver system where material is excavated and catapulted away from the asteroid, would also take too much time.
- A kinetic impactor which would knock the asteroid out of its orbit, was thought to require the launch of too big a space craft as was the option of using a large craft's own gravitational pull to drag the asteroid away from the earth.
The study investigated in each case the mass of spacecraft needed, the warning time required, the orbital deflection achieved and the current readiness of technology. Simulations were run with six different sized asteroids.
John Borland
Wired Science
Sat, 06 Oct 2007 10:31
EDT
For more than 40 years, an asteroid believed to be
potentially
dangerous to Earth has been essentially lost to view. But no more.
The so-called 6344 P-L was first spotted in 1960, and given the
designation Potentially Hazardous Asteroid - meaning that its orbit
took it within .05 astronomical units (about 4,650,000 miles) of
Earth's orbit. But astronomers lost track of it; left behind was only a
number and a vague sense of threat.
However, meteor researcher Peter Jenniskens of the SETI institute now argues, with confirmation from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory' Minor Planet Center, that this wayward wanderer is in fact the same thing as the recently discovered 2007 RR9, making a reappearance this year as part of a 4.7-year orbit.
 |
| ©NASA/SETI Institute/Peter Jenniskens |
| A composite image of the Aurigid meteor shower |
"The object was long recognized to be dangerous, but we didn't know where it was. Now it is no longer just out there," said Jenniskens.
Moreover, the astronomer says, the "asteroid" doesn't really qualify as an asteroid at all. Instead, Jenniskens believes it's the dormant fragment of a comet nucleus, part of a larger body that broke up in the relatively recent past (in stellar terms), creating the Gamma Piscid meteor showers in mid-October and early November.
Under neither name is it likely to hit Earth anytime in the near
future. But the little long-lost beastie will be high in the southern
sky as it passes by Earth in early November, about .07 astronomical
unit away (about 6.5 million miles).
John Steele Gordon
American Heritage
Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:03
EDT
Luckily for astronomers, it was a Friday night in the autumn. That meant that hundreds of thousands of people were at high school football games, many with camcorders at the ready to preserve any gridiron heroics. What they preserved as well, from at least 16 different locations from Kentucky to New York, was the path of a fireball across the sky as it streaked northeastward at better than ten miles a second.
As earth's atmosphere tightened its grip, the yard-wide meteor, which weighed several tons and shone brighter than the full moon, broke up into at least 70 pieces. The only piece ever found weighed about 28 pounds. It announced its arrival on planet Earth by crashing through the back of a car parked in Peekskill, New York, on the night of October 9, 1992, 15 years ago today.
The owner of the car, a red 1980 Chevy Malibu, was 17-year-old Michelle Knapp. She went outside with a friend to investigate the noise, and when they saw the damage to the car, they looked beneath it and discovered the meteorite, nestled in a small crater it had made in the driveway. It was still warm from its passage through the atmosphere. Knapp called the police, who inspected the car and filed a report of criminal mischief. (Given the extensive damage to the car (see photos here), the criminal class in Peekskill must have been very well-armed indeed for mischief to have been a plausible explanation.) The persistent smell of gasoline from the ruptured fuel tank brought the fire department as well. Thanks to the many videos available, astronomers were able to calculate the angle at which the meteoroid had hit the earth's atmosphere: 3.4 degrees. Had it been much shallower, it would have skimmed through the atmosphere and escaped back into space. (When in space, such an object is a meteoroid. When it enters the atmosphere and is incandescent, it becomes a meteor. If it explodes or disintegrates in the atmosphere, it is termed a fireball or bolide. After the pieces land, they are called meteorites.)
Astronomers were even able to determine the path that the meteoroid had taken around the sun. For millions of years it had traveled as close as 80 million miles from the sun, inside the earth's orbit, and had reached out as far as nearly 200 million miles, well beyond Mars. It had taken 1.8 earth years to complete an orbit.
 |
| ©Sara Eichmiller |
| A still photograph taken in Altoona, Pennsylvania, shows some of the fragments the meteor broke into. |
In the early days of the solar system, four billion and more years ago, the earth was frequently bombarded with meteorites, many of them huge. The moon was almost certainly formed by a collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars-size object at that time. Even today, in the sedate middle age of the solar system, earth's considerable gravitational field sweeps up a lot of space junk as the planet orbits the sun. Every day the earth adds many tons to its mass this way. Most of it is in the form of dust, which simply slows up in the atmosphere without incandescing.
But so-called "shooting stars," which are about the size of grains of sand, can be seen on any clear night by the dozens from any spot on earth, if you have the patience to wait for them. During meteor showers, such as the Perseids in August and the Leonids in November, when the earth passes through the debris left in the orbits of comets, they can often be seen at a rate of more than one a minute, all seeming to come from the same point in the sky, called the radiant. Very rarely, a meteor storm is encountered, and shooting stars can be seen by the thousands, such as on the night of November 12 to 13, 1833, when at least a quarter of a million shooting stars were seen over North America.
Much rarer, fortunately, are the larger hunks of space debris that are too big to be vaporized in the upper atmosphere. These meteor falls are still surprisingly common, however. One landed in a field in Yorkshire, England, in 1795 and narrowly missed a worker. It settled the long-standing argument about whether stones really do fall from the sky.
In this country, a woman napping on her couch in her home in Sylacauga, Alabama, was struck by a meteorite on November 30, 1954, when it crashed through her roof, bounced off a radio, and hit her on the leg (see AmericanHeritage.com article here). Houses in Wethersfield, Connecticut, were struck by meteorites only 11 years apart, in 1971 and 1982.
Larger meteors pose graver, but exponentially rarer, dangers. The meteor that produced the Barringer Crater in northern Arizona about 50,000 years ago was roughly 50 yards wide and released about 2.5 megatons of energy to produce a crater nearly a mile wide and 570 feet deep. Such a meteor strikes the earth every thousand years or so.
The "Tunguska event," in 1908, was probably a comet that did not strike the earth but rather exploded in the atmosphere over unpopulated Siberia, with a force equal to that of a hydrogen bomb. It flattened an estimated 80 million trees. Had its path through space been very slightly different, it might have exploded over densely populated Europe, with catastrophic consequences.
A one-kilometer-wide meteor would cause globally devastating effects, but they hit only every half million years or so. A six-mile-wide meteor would end civilization and quite possibly annihilate the human race. One roughly that size is believed to have killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. There are now programs seeking to locate major asteroids and comets with earth-crossing orbits and develop ways of deflecting them, should they prove to be on a collision course.
The meteorite that slammed into Michelle Knapp's car had no such literally earthshaking consequences. Indeed, it proved a boon to Michelle Knapp. She told reporters that she had bought the 12-year-old car from her grandmother for only $100, and therefore the loss was small. But meteorites have a ready market, especially ones that achieve individual fame, often selling for thousands of dollars. (In fact, a fragment of the Peekskill meteorite, along with some video footage and pieces of the Malibu's smashed taillight, will be sold at auction later this month, with an estimated price of $2,000 to $3,000.) Knapp also sold the old clunker of a car, which later toured the world, for enough to buy a brand-new one.
So modest-size meteorites are invited to hit my car if they'd like to. As long as I'm not in it at the time, of course.
Did a comet destroy civilization 12,900 years ago?
Joey Holleman
The State
Sun, 07 Oct 2007 05:51
EDT
Did a comet kill the mammoths and destroy a civilization 12,900 years ago? S.C. site could provide evidence
 |
| ©Unknown |
What might have happened?
According to the theory, a comet broke apart in the atmosphere above what is now eastern North America, producing massive, multiple explosions as its pieces slammed into the surface with more force than all the world's nuclear weapons combined.
What's the evidence?
The fallout from the explosions would have dusted the Earth with microscopic nanodiamonds, magnetic particles, iridium and black carbon. All of those substances have been found in a layer of soil, found continent-wide, dated to about 12,900 years ago.
How was life affected by it?
The explosions and resulting climate change could explain the sudden disappearance of large mammals, such as mammoths and mastodons, at that same time period. Also, it could explain the abrupt end in the archaeological records of the Clovis people, the first to populate North America.
For the second time in less than a decade, a South Carolina river bluff holds evidence pointing to a theory with history-rewriting potential.
Microscopic soil particles from the Topper site near Allendale might hold a tiny key to a big theory: that comet-caused explosions wiped out the mammoths and mastodons, prompted the last ice age and decimated the first human culture in North America about 12,900 years ago.
The comet theory first began generating a buzz at an international meeting of geophysicists in Mexico in May. The findings were published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They are about to go mainstream, with a National Geographic Channel segment tonight. The History Channel will film for a future show at Topper this week.
"People are fascinated by it," said Allen West, an Arizona geophysicist and one of the leaders of the comet team, who is speaking Wednesday at USC. "It has diamonds and giant elephants and Indians. Any new catastrophe theory that comes along gets plenty of attention."
The new theory holds that a comet broke apart in the atmosphere above what is now eastern North America, producing multiple explosions and wildfires as the pieces smashed into the surface.
Scientists, led by Richard Firestone of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., took soil samples from throughout North America and in Belgium. In a layer dating to about 12,900 years ago, they found high levels of iridium, nanodiamonds and glass-like carbon that could have been caused by a comet explosion and subsequent fires.
The Topper site, on the banks of the Savannah River, provided compelling evidence, in part because of earlier findings there by Al Goodyear of the S.C. Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at USC.
Goodyear drew international attention in 2004 when stone points found at Topper that apparently were sharpened by humans were carbon dated to nearly 50,000 years ago. That put human beings in North America thousands of years earlier than thought. For generations, scientists have thought the first humans arrived 13,000 years ago via a land bridge from Asia.
Goodyear's work at Topper, along with similar finds in Brazil and Chile, prompted scientific reconsideration of when humans arrived in North America. It also led to skepticism by scientists who didn't buy Goodyear's theory. In that regard, he found kindred spirits in the comet group.
"This is a pretty wild theory," Goodyear said with a chuckle. "I'm glad I'm not doing this one."
He welcomed West to dig at Topper. At the same depth as Topper's undeniable Clovis artifacts, West found high concentrations of iridium, nanodiamonds and glasslike carbon.
West's findings prompted Goodyear to do his own study on the disappearance of Clovis points. These stone tools, used for hunting and scraping, are found throughout North America only in soil dating back about 13,000 years or more.
The Clovis points stopped showing up in soil layers dating back to 12,900 years ago. Not long after that, a different style of points began showing up from people scientists have dubbed the Redstone culture. Most experts suspect a surviving remnant of the Clovis culture grew into the Redstone culture.
Goodyear's recent study found there were four times as many Clovis points as Redstone points at similar sites. That would indicate a huge population drop from the Clovis to Redstone cultures, possibly caused by some natural catastrophe.
Goodyear's findings put him squarely on the side of the comet theory, and he's not the only one to be swayed, West said.
"It has been pretty quickly embraced," West said. "People weren't comfortable with the existing theories on the disappearance of the large mammals and the Clovis people."
Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling
R. B. Firestone, et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences
Thu, 27 Sep 2007 10:23 EDT
A carbon-rich black layer, dating to {approx}12.9 ka, has been previously identified at {approx}50 Clovis-age sites across North America and appears contemporaneous with the abrupt onset of Younger Dryas (YD) cooling. The in situ bones of extinct Pleistocene megafauna, along with Clovis tool assemblages, occur below this black layer but not within or above it. Causes for the extinctions, YD cooling, and termination of Clovis culture have long been controversial. In this paper, we provide evidence for an extraterrestrial (ET) impact event at {cong}12.9 ka, which we hypothesize caused abrupt environmental changes that contributed to YD cooling, major ecological reorganization, broad-scale extinctions, and rapid human behavioral shifts at the end of the Clovis Period. Clovis-age sites in North American are overlain by a thin, discrete layer with varying peak abundances of (i) magnetic grains with iridium, (ii) magnetic microspherules, (iii) charcoal, (iv) soot, (v) carbon spherules, (vi) glass-like carbon containing nanodiamonds, and (vii) fullerenes with ET helium, all of which are evidence for an ET impact and associated biomass burning at {approx}12.9 ka. This layer also extends throughout at least 15 Carolina Bays, which are unique, elliptical depressions, oriented to the northwest across the Atlantic Coastal Plain. We propose that one or more large, low-density ET objects exploded over northern North America, partially destabilizing the Laurentide Ice Sheet and triggering YD cooling. The shock wave, thermal pulse, and event-related environmental effects (e.g., extensive biomass burning and food limitations) contributed to end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions and adaptive shifts among PaleoAmericans in North America.
Full Article Here
Alan Boyle
MSNBC
Wed, 10 Oct 2007 01:09 EDT
It's a story worthy of an "Indiana Jones" sequel: Drawn by outlandish legends, a controversial collector journeys to Peru, purchases pieces of a rare meteorite under shady circumstances, then has to hightail it across the border to Bolivia with police in hot pursuit. Now the plot is nearing its resolution - and the finale could make another meteorite-size splash.
 |
| ©Michael Farmer |
| Meteorite hunter Michael Farmer kneels at the rim of a crater in Peru |
"It's been quite an interesting week for me," Michael Farmer told me today from his home in Arizona. "I did have to make my escape, that's for sure. ... Another day in the life of a meteorite hunter."
The tale began Sept. 15, when villagers in a remote corner of Peru said they saw a fireball falling to Earth, went out to investigate and spotted a huge crater partly filled with bubbling water. Some smelled an unpleasant odor, and fell ill with headaches and upset stomachs. Initial reports from the scene suggested that the cause of this all was a meteorite emitting hazardous fumes - and in response, authorities called a state of emergency.
When Farmer heard about all this, during a buying trip to Spain, he couldn't believe it. "Pure lunacy," he recalled. But in the days that followed, investigators confirmed the existence of a meteorite - though not the part about hundreds of people getting sick - so Farmer decided he'd better check out the scene.
After a stopover in Colombia to buy more meteorite specimens, Farmer dropped in on the Peruvian border town of Desaguadero on Sept. 29 and stopped at the police station to ask about the meteorite site. He said the police gave him directions - and sold him samples of the space rock. "Every one of them had pieces in their pockets," Farmer told me.
Soon afterward, he arrived at the site, talked with farmers in a nearby farming village called Carancas and bought still more samples. "We paid very good prices to them, and the people were very happy that we were there and helping them," Farmer said in his Web account of the expedition.
But the way Farmer tells it, at least some of the local police weren't happy with the $100 they were getting for pieces of the rock - and Farmer said he got the distinct impression that if he didn't pay more, he would find himself sitting in a Peruvian jail cell.
'A slight international incident'
The meteorite hunt was getting too hot, in Farmer's judgment. "We actually fled in a taxi to another border crossing and made it out OK," Farmer said. "It's turned into a slight international incident."
There are two sides to every story like this, and late last week Desaguadero's police chief denied that he sold Farmer any fragments of the meteorite. Chief Victor Anaya was quoted as saying Farmer's claims to that effect were "completely false," and he called for an investigation into the allegations.
"Now that the [crap] hit the fan, of course, they're denying that," Farmer said.
In the wake of Farmer's flight, some have branded him as an "opportunistic confrontational collector," a money-grubbing Yankee taking advantage of Peru's poor. The Peruvian newspaper La Republica compared the meteorite caper to the long-running flap over Machu Picchu artifacts, and bemoaned the "loss of national patrimony."
Farmer, meanwhile, bemoans the lack of scientific access to the meteorite's motherlode. Even Peruvian scientists say they have been turned away by the police guarding the site. And Farmer said it's only a matter of time before the crater fills in during the Andean region's rainy season. The more time the fragile rock spends buried in the mud, the less scientifically valuable it will become.
"I told them, 'For the love of God, dig up the meteorite,'" Farmer said.
Sneak preview of analysis
Is there really a meteorite down there? In the wake of the first reports, some experts speculated that the crater was merely a smelly hole in the ground that villagers came upon while they were looking for the cause of the fireball they saw. But Farmer said "there's zero question" that a space rock caused the crater - and based on the analysis conducted so far, the rock was a doozy.
"It's probably the largest chondrite meteorite to have fallen," Farmer said. He said the mass could be as much as 10 tons - which would be like a moving van falling from orbit.
"It will be talked about for many years in the meteorite world," Farmer predicted.
So why haven't we heard anything authoritative so far? Farmer attributed his information to meteorite experts at the University of Arizona who have been analyzing the samples he brought back last week, but those scientists are not yet ready to publicize their findings.
Harold Connolly, an expert who is based at Kingsborough College in New York as well as the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, told me he couldn't discuss the results until they get the stamp of approval from the Meteoritical Society. That may come next week, he said.
So we'll just have to stay tuned for that official verdict on the story. In the meantime, Farmer said he's already shipping out samples to scientists and collectors in the United States, Japan, Canada and elsewhere. And he's not the only one.
"We recovered over 700 grams of the meteorite," Farmer told me. "I know of about 7 kilograms in other private hands. And according to the locals, they estimate that 20 kilograms have been thrown out of the crater."
What's that smell?
One last mystery needs to be addressed: What about that smelly, sickening odor supposedly coming from the crater?
"It was extremely exaggerated. That's the first thing," said Farmer, who talked with numerous villagers about the event and even came across what he said was a picture of the smoke trail left behind by the fireball's fall. "I'm sure there was a heavy sulfur smell. That is not abnormal. Sulfur smells like rotten eggs, and that can make you physically sick."
Farmer guessed that 30 villagers were seen by doctors, not the hundreds initially claimed. He speculated that the fireball, the blast of mud (which damaged one of the houses in the village), the shaking ground and the sight of the crater added to the unease.
"It had to be absolutely terrifying," he said. "Somebody gets sick, and pretty soon everybody is terrified and gets sick. ... There was a very large part of mass hysteria there, which is understandable."
The strange case of the Peruvian fireball is an occurrence that those villagers will probably never forget - and that goes for Farmer as well.
"This has turned out to be an incredible event," he told me. "I've been doing meteorites for 13 years, and nothing even close to this has ever happened."
Undergraduates Discover More than 1,300 Asteroids
News Wise
Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:47 EDT
Undergraduate astronomy students at the University of Washington combing through images from a specialized telescope have discovered more than 1,300 asteroids that had never before been observed. That is about one out of every 250 known objects in the solar system.
The five students set out in 2005 to find exploding stars outside our solar system but their efforts were quickly sidetracked.
"We started searching for supernovae using data from the second phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and all these asteroids were in the way," said Andrew Becker, a UW research assistant professor in astronomy.
"We decided that rather than get frustrated by the asteroids we should do some science and note details about our observations. I kept asking the students what they had found and they kept saying, 'More asteroids. No supernovae, but lots of asteroids.'"
Becker is a research adviser to the UW Pre-Major in Astronomy Program, which aims to increase diversity in the sciences by allowing freshmen and sophomores to begin doing research at a time when they are still determining their majors. The program began in 2005 with funding from the UW Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity.
"It's real science that these students are doing in their first and second years of college, and the data sets they are using are pretty large, which gives them skills such as data-mining that they can use for a long time," Becker said.
The undergraduates who found the asteroids - Amy Rose, Amber Almy, Amanjot Singh, Kenza Sigrid Arraki and Kathryn Smith - made the discoveries in 2005 and 2006. They used computers to search through images made by the 2.5-meter Sloan telescope at Apache Point, N.M.
The findings were submitted to the Minor Planet Center at Harvard University for verification. The center has given each asteroid a preliminary designation, but if enough data is gathered during a three-year period each can be named by its initial discoverer.
"It's an amazing feeling - I feel like I'm jumping into research," said Rose, a junior who went to high school in Lake Stevens and now lives in Edmonds. "It's not just taking tests and going to class."
The students recorded data on the asteroids' orbits and colors, which are important because asteroids of similar color and orbit are likely made of the same material and possibly came from a single larger body that was broken up by a collision in space millions of years ago. For instance, recent evidence suggests that the asteroid responsible for killing off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was sent hurtling to Earth when it broke off from a larger body in a space collision. Other remnants of that collision remain in solar orbit in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Eric Agol, a UW assistant professor of astronomy and faculty adviser to the pre-major program, said the observations could help trace the history of some space bodies, particularly in the asteroid belt. It is significant, he said, that the undergraduates have found so many asteroids to add to the catalog of about 335,000 known bodies in the solar system.
"That's the whole goal, to start in the first quarter and get the students excited about research and about science," Agol said. "So far we have two or three who are going to major in astronomy, but there are others who are going into other sciences, which is a broader goal."
For Rose, who plans a double major in astronomy and physics, the program has had the desired effect. Though she planned an astronomy major when she chose the UW, the pre-major program has reinforced that decision and strengthened her desire to join NASA as an astronaut.
Besides discovering asteroids, the students' observations added information for more than 14,000 asteroids that were already known. Of all the asteroids they observed, only one has a path that crosses Earth's orbit, Becker said.
"There's no immediate danger, but anything that crosses Earth's orbit could, in a hundred, a thousand, a million years, crash into us if we reach the same point at the same time," he said.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II is creating a detailed, three-dimensional map of about 1 million galaxies and quasars in one-quarter of the night sky using images captured by a highly specialized telescope.
The survey is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium on behalf of 25 participating institutions, including the UW. It is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society of Germany and the Higher Education Funding Council for England.
Mysterious shaking rattles Central Coast this morning
Melissa Mecija
KSBY News
Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:23
EDT
California - Mysterious shaking rattled the Central Coast late Wednesday morning.
It happened around 11:00 and was felt all the way from Santa Maria to Morro Bay.
 |
| ©KSBY News |
Some said it felt like a small earthquake. Others thought it may be another sonic boom.
Caltech and seismic experts at UC Santa Barbara says there was no earthquake in the region during that time frame, except for a couple small ones in the Paso Robles area.
They agree that it was most likely caused by military flight testing.
There are several military facilities that test supersonic aircraft, including Vandenberg Air Force Base, Lemoore Naval Air Station, and Edwards Air Force Base. None could confirm they tested their aircraft during that time.
Hundreds of you called in during the last mysterious shaking in July. At that time, Edwards Air Force Base says new F-22 Raptor training missions probably caused that sonic boom.
Raptors are known for the distinctive sound they make when they go supersonic.
Most residents we talked to were not too startled by this morning's shaker.
"The mobile home kind of rocked a little bit and the windows shook and that was it," said Lompoc resident, Joan Baker.
"It just sounded like there was something on the roof, something hit the roof-maybe some strong wind," said Lompoc resident, Gavin Simpson. "It didn't really occur to me [and] it kind of stopped me for a moment."
Military aircraft do fly through the area frequently. Even though some do reach supersonic speeds, like the F-22, a low flying aircraft not going at that speed could have also caused minor shaking.
A spokesman from Edwards Air Force Base says right now, conditions are ideal to hear a sonic boom or any noise coming from large aircraft.
The spokesman adds, winds coming in off the ocean help to carry that sound.
Comment: It seems that they are trying very hard to write these 'booms' off to military jets which are not supposed to create sonic booms over inhabited areas.
Very curious.
Jeff Haldiman
News Tribune
Tue, 09 Oct 2007 09:49
EDT
The origin remains a mystery, but an aircraft breaking the sound barrier is considered the most likely cause.
Numerous calls were received at the 911 center. Some reports indicated the noises rocked and shook buildings, but authorities reported no damage being attributed to the booms.
Police went to the area where crews are working on the City View interchange. Blasting has been taking place to reshape the land, but workers said they were not blasting at that time. However, they did hear the booms, just as other citizens had.
"If that were a blasting incident, something catastrophic would have happened," said Jefferson City Fire Department Education Officer Jason Turner, who said their department got a number of calls and e-mails from citizens wondering what had happened.
"After we got the calls we started checking with those contractors who had blasting permits at this time and all were not blasting when the booms were heard," he said.
Streaks were spotted in the sky by police officers not long after the booms were
heard, making them believe it was an airplane breaking the sound barrier.
Officers called the control tower at the Jefferson City Memorial
Airport to see if they could find out from the FAA what had taken
place. Although no definitive answer was found, all indications pointed
to a sonic boom.
Since Monday was a state and federal holiday, the Missouri National Guard was not flying their planes, according to spokesperson Capt. Tammy Spicer.
"Most of our activity would be down at Ft. Leonard Wood, where we do have a bombing range," she said. "Because it was a holiday I would be shocked to find out someone was flying around, unless it was a something set up ahead of time."
The Missouri National Guard does have a squad of F-15's based at Lambert Airport in St. Louis.
Astronomia.pl
Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:31 EDT
Polish secondary school students from Szczecin and Warsaw have discovered two new asteroids in images that were provided for them within the framework of the "International Asteroid Search Campaign." The discoveries follow a series of successes of young amateur astronomers conducting research in their schools under the supervision of their physics teachers.
Polish students discovered the new objects during the ongoing edition of the "International Asteroid Search Campaign". One of asteroids was discovered by students from the Tadeusz Czacki Secondary School in Warsaw, working under the supervision of Ms. Barbara Dłużewska, a physics teacher. The second object was spotted by students from the Secondary School No. 13 in Szczecin, Mr. Tomasz Skowron being their supervisor. The objects were designated K07T00Z and K07T04Y respectively.
The Campaign has so far resulted in discoveries of eleven such objects. The discoverers were from Germany, Morocco and the United States, among other countries. All the discoveries were confirmed on Thursday, 11 October, by the IASC programme coordinator, Patric Miller of the Holland School of Sciences & Mathematics, Texas. The results obtained, inter alia, by Polish students, have been forwarded to the Minor Planet Center, headquartered at Harvard University, which gathers data concerning small Solar System bodies for the International Astronomical Union.
Polish students already discovered six planetoids in the first half of 2007. At that time among many other discoverers were students from the Secondary School No. 10 of Professor Stefan Banach Complex of Schools in Toruń, who worked under the supervision of Mr. Bogdan Sobczuk.
The schools from Toruń, Szczecin and Warsaw participate in the IASC campaign within the framework of EU-HOU programme. The schools joined the programme following an initiative by the late Professor Bohdan Paczyński, who - alongside Professor Lech Mankiewicz of the Center for Theoretical Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Professor Grzegorz Wrochna of the Institute for Nuclear Studies in Świerk created a computer program that utilizes webcams for astronomical observations. Developed for school use, the program has contributed to the introduction of new methods of teaching in sciences, including the use of remotely-controlled telescopes or radiotelescopes.
Comment: Interesting that more asteroids are
being discovered and
reported by students these days, don't you think?
Meteor Seen In The
Skies Of Australia
Cherry Mario
AHN Media
Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:06
EDT
Western Victoria, Melbourne - Tension gripped Western Victoria residents after witnessing bright light in heavens for two straight nights believed to be a meteor form outer space.
ABC News reported that residents of Ballarat, west of Melbourne, said that they saw a bright orange-colored light in the sky about 10 p.m Tuesday.
Reports said that the bright light looks like a Unidentified Flying Object (UFO).
It was learned that the object flew around the air for more than one minute, But some residents believed that these flying object could have been a model helicopter.
A model helicopter can fly from zero up to 100 kph in just a few seconds.
Last Monday, calls from the residents of South Australia and Western Victoria were received by authorities and media offices reporting something looking like bright green colored object shooting like a fireball westward in the sky.
Police start to took the calls at around 8pm (CST).
Police confirmed to the ABC News that the Bureau of Meteorology said
later that the Bureau of Meteorology confirmed the object seen on
Monday night was a meteor.
Cloudbait Observatory
Sat, 20 Oct 2007 01:59
EDT
There have been three meteors recorded at Cloudbait Observatory in Colorado over the past 45 days.
 |
| ©Cloudbait |
| August 9th, 2007 |
This fireball occurred at 3:43 AM MDT over northeast Colorado.
The image above is from the Cloudbait camera. Note that the event was bright enough to light up the overhead clouds.
This event happened several days before the peak of the Perseid shower, but does not appear to be related to this shower
 |
| ©Cloudbait |
| August 19, 2007 |
This fireball occurred at 9:31 PM MDT over central Colorado. No witness reports.
The image above is from the Cloudbait camera. The setting Moon is seen at the horizon to the right (azimuth 230°). This meteor was not associated with any known shower.
Based on data from three cameras, the meteor appeared over Nederland, CO at a height of 100 km (62.5 mi) and descended to the south (bearing 191°), over the Kenosha mountains and into South Park, ending about 18 km (11 mi) south of Hartsel. Its final height was 53 km (33 mi). The descent angle was 19.9° from horizontal, and the average speed was 55 km/s (124,000 mph). The high velocity, high altitude, gradual increase and decrease in intensity, and lack of fragmentation all suggest that this event probably did not produce any meteorites.
 |
| ©Cloudbait |
| October 6, 2007 |
This fireball occurred at 5:54 AM MDT over central Colorado. I have received one possible witness report.
The image above is from the Cloudbait camera. From this location, the meteor brightness was about magnitude -10, or the same as a half Moon. This meteor radiant was at RA=133° dec -19, which is not associated with any known shower.
Based on data from the cameras, the meteor appeared several
kilometers north of Castle Rock, CO at a height of 85 km (53 mi) and descended to
the northwest
(bearing 316°), exploding at a height of 78 km (49 mi) over the
Littleton area of Denver. The descent angle was 18.4° from horizontal,
and the average speed was 23.9 km/s (54,000 mph). Ordinarily this low
speed and shallow descent angle would be a strong indicator for
meteorite production, however, the high altitude of fragmentation and
large luminous efficiency suggest this meteor was the product of a
porous, fragile parent body. As such, it may have burned up completely.
If meteorites were produced, I'd anticipate carbonaceous chondrites in
the Marston Lake area.
Strange happenings in Basingstoke, UK skies
Vicky O'Hare
thisishampshire.net
Sun, 21 Oct 2007 23:16
EDT
Strange happenings were seen in Basingstoke skies on Friday.
Several people have contacted The Gazette claiming to have seen a flurry of red lights in the sky between 10pm and 10.30pm.
Gill Dunn emailed in describing the lights as looking like "solid jellyfish".
She added: "They were silent and just as we were about to film them, the front ones dispersed and gradually they all just disappeared into thin air."
Another reader described seeing a line of red lights that looked a bit like stars at around the same time.
The Sunday Times reported that a chunk of Halley's Comet flashed through the atmosphere above southern England on Friday, causing a sonic boom, which could explain the mysterious sightings.
Did you see any strange goings on or have any footage of the lights? If so leave your comments below or contact the newsdesk on 01256 337444.
Associated Press
Fri, 19 Oct 2007 23:19
EDT
Montgomery officials are breathing a sigh of relief this afternoon after reports of a plane crash around Hope Hull turned out to be false alarms.
Montgomery County Sheriff D-T- Marshall said his department sent up helicopters to investigate sometime before noon, but nothing was found.
Several people called the department saying they heard loud explosions and saw smoke.
Marshall said a fighter jet had been in the area and they're speculating it created a sonic boom and the smoke people saw probably came from a man who was burning brush in the area.
He also said Danley Field airport did not report having any aircraft dropping from radar.
Cloudbait Observatory
Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:54 EDT
 |
| ©Cloudbait |
| Fireball October 20th |
This event was witnessed over Colorado on October 20th at 5:57 AM MDT. The low speed and reported orange color suggest this may have been reentering space debris, although no candidate object is immediately obvious.
The duration of the event was over 20 seconds, and some debris can be seen trailing the head. The path began over western Colorado and ended over south central Colorado.
This image is from the Cloudbait camera. I anticipate having additional camera information within a few days. The large dropout in the middle occurred because of the limited buffer size of the camera, which had to stop collecting data briefly after 10 seconds to write it to disk.
Express and Echo
Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:29
EDT
Strange lights glowing in the sky over Exeter have left residents bemused, confused and feeling slightly silly.
Many people have now come forward after the Echo highlighted the first sighting this week - from a woman afraid nobody would believe her.
In fact, the report prompted a host of calls from residents right across the city who have seen something odd and are now not afraid to talk about it.
Just hours after the Echo reported on a bizarrely lit circular object seen over Redhills, another reader has said she saw something odd the day before, over Peterborough Close, Exwick.
Ann Watson had just returned home from a hospital operation and was recuperating outside her home on Saturday afternoon.
She said: "It was around 4pm, so it was still quite light when I saw this black object coming up from the Exe Estuary.
"It was moving very slowly and at first I thought it could be a helicopter but as it got closer I could see it was not.
"It was a long, black thing and made no noise. I thought for a minute I had survived the operation but the Angel of Death was coming to get me!
"My neighbour came out to see it and so did my daughter. It climbed higher and higher and disappeared into the clouds to the north west.
"It was very odd and I can't explain it."
The following day, a 58-year-old woman in Redhills was left stunned after she saw a strangely lit, circular object flying over the city.
The woman, who has asked not to be named, spotted the object between 10.50pm and 11.05pm on Sunday.
She said: "The object was over Haldon and coming towards me.
"It was circular in shape and had lots of flashing, strobe-like lights with a darker feature that seemed to change shape within the light.
"I have seen plenty of planes flying over and know that this was not a plane.
"It came over the bungalow and I went out to the back to see it fly over Exwick and away."
The next day Betty Turner, of Queen's Road, St Thomas, said she also saw a mysterious object in the sky between 9pm and 10pm.
She said: "It was the shape of a kite. I couldn't see any lights on it but I was able to see it as it was a clear night.
"It wasn't travelling very fast. I had time to go across the bungalow and get my binoculars to have another look at it.
"I think I was putting my dustbin out at the time."
Caroline Mortimore, on the other side of the city in Summerway, Beacon Heath, spotted a similar glowing light in the sky. She was with her children Curtis, 12, and Jasmine nine.
She said: "We all saw it coming across the sky, very bright orange.
"We couldn't guess what it was but it was very strange."
Another man, who wanted to remain anonymous, said he was travelling back from work in Newton Abbot with a friend when he saw something strange in the sky.
He said: "I was in the passenger seat coming home from work.
"I only saw it briefly as it was travelling so fast. It was like a shooting star but couldn't have been as it was only 4pm."
The man said he thought it seemed "crazy" to think he had seen a UFO but decided he would contact the Echo as he had read other people had seen one, too.
If anyone saw the strange lights or can explain what might have caused them, contact Mike Byrne on 01392 442238.
Obscure
Comet Brightens Suddenly
Joe Rao
Space.com
Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:39 EDT
A small and very faint comet has surprised observers around the world by overnight becoming bright enough to see with the unaided eye.
Comet Holmes, which was discovered in November 1892 by Edwin Holmes, in London England, was no brighter than magnitude 17 in mid-October - that's about 25,000 times fainter than the faintest star that can normally be seen without any optical aid. In order to view an object this faint, one would need a moderately large telescope.
 |
| ©Space.com |
| Comet Holmes' location as of Oct. 24th at 8 p.m. local time from midnorthern latitudes. |
But the comet's brightness has suddenly rocketed all the way up to 3rd-magnitude, brightening nearly 400,000-times in less than 24-hours! On this astronomers scale, smaller numbers mean brighter objects. From urban locations, a 3rd-magnitude object might be hidden by light pollution, but under rural skies it would be clearly vsiible.
No tail
Comet Holmes is not as dramatic as some, lacking the characteristic tail that makes some of these frozen wanderers so beautiful. Instead, it appears as a fuzzy, albeit distinct, starlike object, but with no noticeable tail.
Bright moonlight can make it hard to find. But with a map and a small telescope, any relatively seasoned amateur should be able to spot it.
The comet is currently located among the stars of the constellation Perseus, which can be found about halfway up in the northeast part of the sky as darkness falls. Perseus is almost directly overhead by around 2 a.m. local daylight time and is still well up in the northwest sky as dawn begins to break.
Why Comet Holmes has undergone such an explosive outburst is not understood. What is amazing is that it made its closest approach to the sun last May, but came no closer than 191 million miles (307 million kilometers) to the sun. The comet is now moving away from the sun and currently is quite far out from Earth at a distance of 151 million miles (243 million kilometers). Not exactly a recipe for the typical show-off comet.
From deep space
This comet is part of Jupiter's "family" of comets - a group in which the far end of their respective orbits (aphelia) cluster around the orbit of Jupiter and takes 6.88 years to make one circuit around the Sun.
So why would a comet far out in the cold of space suddenly brighten hundreds of thousands of times? What is the source of such energy? Does it come from within the comet or without?
Alas, comets remain largely mysterious.
Comet Holmes is not alone in exhibiting anomalous effects. In the past, other comets have undergone unexpected outbursts in brightness. And this is probably not the first outburst for Comet Holmes: when it was discovered in 1892, it was likely in outburst mode, since it became as bright as fourth magnitude and was dimly visible to the naked eye.
"It appears that it is undergoing an outburst that strikingly parallels [a] famous 1892 event," said comet expert John Bortle.
'Yellowish star'
Viewers all report the comet as appearing star-like, Bortle said, noting that observer Bob King, in Minnesota, said it looked "like a yellowish star."
Because of occasional close approaches to Jupiter, the orbit of Comet Holmes has been altered a few times. In fact the comet was considered "lost" for nearly 60 years before it was finally recovered with a large observatory telescope in 1964.
As to what this object will do in the coming days and weeks is not known. The brilliant light of the waxing Moon will be a hinderance for the rest of this week, but if you have binoculars or a small telescope, you might want to try seeing what certainly is one of the solar system's most enigmatic objects!
Sudden Naked-Eye Comet Shocks the Astronomy World
Roger W. Sinnott
Sky & Telescope
Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:34
EDT
A distant comet that was as faint as magnitude 18 on October 20th has suddenly brightened by a millionfold, altering the naked-eye appearance of the constellation Perseus.
This startling outburst of Comet Holmes (17P) may be even stronger than the one that occurred 115 years ago, in November 1892, when the comet was first spotted by English amateur Edwin Holmes.
 |
| ©Babak Tafreshi |
| On the evening of October 24th, through bright moonlight and light pollution over Tehran, Iran, Babak Tafreshi took this wide-field panorama. "This is unbelievable!" he writes. "I was amazed to find Comet Holmes so easily with the naked eye in the light-polluted skies of metropolitan Tehran." |
According to IAU Circular 8886, issued Wednesday October 24th by the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams in Cambridge, Massachusetts, A. Henriquez Santana at Tenerife, Canary Islands, was the first to notice the outburst shortly after local midnight on the 24th. The comet was then about 8th magnitude, but within minutes Ramon Naves and colleagues in Barcelona, Spain, caught it at magnitude 7.3.
 |
| Periodic Comet Holmes (17P) is currently located in east-central Perseus. Although this finder chart shows the northeastern horizon at dusk, the comet will be easier to spot late at night, when Perseus is more nearly overhead. Click on image for a larger view. |
Internet discussion groups came alive with the news. "To my amazement, 17P had brightened to naked-eye visibility," exclaimed Bob King when he spotted Comet Holmes shortly before dawn in Duluth, Minnesota. "What a sight!" he posted to the Comets Mailing List. Alan Hale of Cloudcroft, New Mexico, concurred. To Hale (well-known codiscoverer of Comet Hale-Bopp) it appeared essentially starlike in a telescope until he switched to high power.
Then things only got better. As Earth continued to turn, nightfall arrived in Japan. "It is visible with naked eyes in a large city!" posted Seiichi Yoshida, who observed the comet from beside Tsurumi River in Yokohama. By 17:15 Universal Time he was describing Comet Holmes as magnitude 2.8.
Comet expert Gary Kronk expects this object to remain bright and grow from a starlike point to several arcminutes across over the next few nights as it makes its way slowly westward across Perseus. Its position on October 25th (0h UT) is right ascension 3h 53m, declination +50.1° (equinox 2000), and by October 30th it will have moved only to 3h 48m, +50.4°. For those living in the Northern Hemisphere, Perseus is visible all night at this time of year.
 |
| ©Clay Sherrod / ASO |
| This
12-arcminute-wide frame from Arkansas Sky Observatory shows the comet
as a brilliant, near-circular disk on the morning of October 25th. Clay
Sherrod used a 0.4-meter (16-inch) Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope at f/3.
|
Update Oct. 25: "This object is amazing!" posted Brian Cudnik of Houston, Texas, on the Yahoo CometChasing group after coming in from his telescope on the evening of the 24th. "I have just observed it with an 8-inch f/10 Cassegrain, boosting the power up to 163x then to 508x.... The bright inner coma seems displaced off-center toward position angle 315°. The inner coma opens up into a fan toward position angle 300°, and I have noticed one ripple, akin to the hoods/ripples seen in Comet Hale-Bopp ten years ago. The coma is uniform in brightness, aside from this fan-shape material emanating from the central condensation, and has a well-defined edge." He measured the coma to be 69 arcseconds wide using using the drift method. "The entire object has a nice yellow-white color; no sign of any tail. The apparent magnitude is +2.8 (estimated using Mirfak at +1.9 and the other two bright stars adjacent to it at +3.0 each) and has remained rather steady all evening."
 |
| ©Griffith Observatory / Anthony Cook |
| Despite
moonlight and smoke from wildfires near Los Angeles, Anthony Cook
captured the comet at the prime focus of Griffith Observatory's 12-inch
Zeiss refractor at 8:30 UT on October 25th. This frame, cropped to 4
arcminutes wide, shows the comet's nucleus slightly off-center in the
larger coma. In longer exposures the coma had a well-defined edge,
allowing Cook to measure its growth rate. He got a diameter of 86
arcseconds at 7:46 UT, then 89 arcseconds an hour later.
|
Posted Dan Laszlo of Fort Collins, Colorado: "In an 18-inch Newtonian at 90x, the yellow orb is like a bright spherical planetary nebula. Diameter of the bright portion is about equal to the lunar crater Tycho, so magnification helps. I can detect a very faint spherical outer envelope, about equal in radius to the diameter of the bright portion, tough with the moonlight."
From Florian Boyd, Palm Springs, California: "I think this is about the most amazing thing I've ever seen in the sky!"
John Rudolph
Today's News Herald
Fri, 26 Oct 2007 07:08
EDT
A strange bright light appeared in the darkness of the pre-dawn sky south of Lake Havasu Thursday morning, hovering and glowing with an eerie amber light before disappearing suddenly, a Lake Havasu City man has reported.
"It was in the southern sky. It seemed to be hovering," said Trevor Lowder, 32.
Lowder arrived at work shortly after 6 a.m. when a co-worker alerted him to a strange light in the still-dark sky. Running outside, Lowder said the light was clearly visible with the naked eye, about half the brightness of Venus. Once outside, he watched the object for several minutes before it appeared to accelerate out of view.
"It was disc-shaped," Lowder said. "I'm very, very sure that it was not natural. I've got to tell you, this is the first time I've seen something like this."
When a commercial airliner approached from the east, the object dimmed, pulsated and then disappeared, appearing to accelerate rapidly. "I'm very sure that I caught a glimpse of a metallic reflection," Lowder said.
About 25 minutes later, five jet aircraft arrived in the area where the light had been. "I've never seen that many planes clustered together," he said.
A co-worker, Justin Harrison, said he also saw the strange, early morning light. He described it as a distinctly yellow glow that either remained stationary or was moving very slowly. Harrison also confirmed the appearance of multiple aircraft in the area of the light about 30 minutes after its disappearance.
An official from the Federal Aviation Administration for the Western-Pacific region, which covers Arizona, said he was unaware of any aerial activity that could explain the strange light. Lake Havasu also lies in the middle of several Air Force bases and other military facilities, but spokesmen from both the Luke and Nellis Air Force bases, the closest facilities to the city, said there was no Air Force activity in the area Thursday morning.
"I know for a fact it couldn't have been us," said Lt. Bryan Bouchard, of Luke Air Force base.
The small, little-known Holmes comet, generally invisible to the naked eye, recently grew 400,000 times in brightness, and would likely have been visible as a brownish-yellow light in Lake Havasu's dark skies. However, the comet would have appeared in the northeast corner of the sky, near the constellation Perseus, while the strange light reported Thursday was said to have appeared in the southwestern sky, between Lake Havasu and Parker.
Astronomers from the Seward Observatory at Arizona State University said they could think of no other stellar event that could be responsible for the brief but brilliant appearance of the light.
The sky Wednesday night was also full of unexplained lights. Resident Jillian Danielson said she spotted six stationary yellowish-white lights high above the mountains to the south of town, around 7:45 p.m. The lights were in a straight row, and mysteriously disappeared after a few moments (full disclosure: Danielson contributes freelance material to Today's-News).
Barbara Plante, a spokesperson for Luke Air Force base, said the international space station and the space shuttle were briefly visible to the naked eye at around 6:15 Wednesday night. However, the lights, with about the luminosity of Venus, streaked across the northern sky in about five minutes, Plante said.
The lights would be visible again Thursday night, in the southern sky, she said.
Strange lights in the sky over Arizona are nothing new. In 1997, thousands of residents in Phoenix observed six evenly spaced orange-red orbs hovering over the city, and a physician captured the phenomenon on video. The "Phoenix lights," as they were eventually known, caused a worldwide media sensation when no earthy explanation for their appearance was forthcoming.
According to the Arizona Republic, military officials ultimately blamed the phenomenon on flares dropped by jets from the Barry M. Goldwater Range. But despite the official explanation, many remain skeptical, and one researcher said analysis of the video of the lights proved they were not flares.
Comment: Unmentioned is the fact that former Arizona governor Fife Symington himself came out and said he saw an "alien spacecraft" flying over Phoenix. At the time he tried to debunk the sighting.
Dozens of city residents and Lake Havasu visitors have also reported strange sights in the sky to several national UFO networks, whose findings are available online.
Sightings of unknown craft are also not limited to ordinary citizens.
According to a new book by actress Shirley McClaine, Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich sighted a large triangular craft hovering above him while in Washington state several years ago, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported this week.
For those interested in less mysterious astral phenomenon, sky-watchers will be treated to a meteor shower this November, around Thanksgiving. The shower is known as the Leonides because of its proximity to the constellation Leo.
You may contact the reporter at jrudolf@havasunews.com
KXMCTV Minot
Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:16 EDT
Last night we told you about an object seen in the sky over North Dakota that was described as a fireball.
This morning something similar was seen in South Dakota.
An object was seen in skyline this morning, but what it was is still not known.
 |
| ©Unknown |
| Fireball in South Dakota |
The first clip of video was taken at 8:00 AM from a mall skycam looking south- southeast.
You can clearly see the object leaving two vapor trails behind in the sky as it drifts toward the southern horizon.
The second clip was taken from a Rapid City skycam.
This view is looking east as the object moves from north to south parallel to the horizon.
The second half of the video from Rapid City was captured at about 8:15 central time.
Yury Zaitsev
RIA Novosti
Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:52 EDT
Anatoly Perminov, the Russian Space Agency chief, announced at a recent news conference that there were plans to develop a space system that could protect the Earth from a potential asteroid impact by 2040. Members of the scientific community are unanimous in that the asteroid danger is real and that some measures should be taken to prevent it. The discovery of Apophis three years ago made them and the general public even more aware of that threat.
Apophis will pass exceptionally close to the Earth in 2029, only 40,000 kilometers away, which is where we have most of our communications satellites. Terrestrial gravity might cause this asteroid to leave its trajectory and collide with the Earth in 2036.
The consequences of such an impact would be much more dramatic than the fallout of the Tunguska event, the meteoroid-caused explosion near the Tunguska River in Siberia, just under a hundred years ago. Yet, the scale of the potential damage would be local rather than global, with Apophis measuring only 350 meters in diameter. A global disaster can only be caused by an asteroid as large as one kilometer across or more.
As far as collisions with space rocks are concerned, the Earth has, in fact, been more fortunate than other planets. Its close neighbors Mars and Mercury have their surfaces riddled with craters.
The Earth's atmosphere and Jupiter bearing the brunt of some of the heaviest impacts, along with other factors, contribute to our planet's being the solar system's only one capable of sustaining life. But it has been hit by large celestial bodies many times before, so there are no guarantees it will remain habitable forever.
The diameter of a relatively new crater formed just 50,000 years ago in what is now Arizona, in the United States, is about 1.5 kilometers.
The Canadian province of Quebec has two craters presumably left by a meteoroid that split apart in midair: one is 32 kilometers across and the other is 22 kilometers.
The 170-kilometer crater on the Yucatan Peninsula, which became the Gulf of Mexico, is the result of an impact believed to have been produced by an asteroid some 65 million years ago. A similar strike today would kill the entire human race, destroying almost all biological links.
The Earth has narrowly escaped being struck by asteroids a countless number of times. The chance of a large asteroid impact is a realistic one. Astronomers say this is a question of "when" rather than "if."
It used to be believed that impacts like the Tunguska event happen every 700 to 900 years. Today scientists contend that such events could occur much more frequently, as often as once every a century. This is because the Earth is now followed by a tail of large celestial bodies. More asteroids have been sighted in the past decade than in the two preceding centuries.
Scientists suggest monitoring all space objects that fly in dangerous proximity to the Earth. This will require 5-meter telescopes, with three or four mounted in each hemisphere. The telescopes will target some particular segment of outer space, and data collected with their help could then form the foundation of a catalogue of asteroids measuring more than a kilometer across.
Installed on board a spacecraft, telescopes with a mirror 20 to 30 centimeters in diameter could monitor asteroids measuring 50-100 meters across at a distance of several million kilometers from the Earth. The main objective of such monitoring will be to follow the trajectory of objects that may have a potential impact on the Earth.
Scientists say that after at least 90% of large asteroids are recorded and constantly observed, it will be possible to warn the humankind about the threat of an impact some 80-100 years ahead.
But it remains unclear how a sighted asteroid can really be stopped from striking the Earth. Would it be a good idea to preempt an impact by hitting the approaching celestial body with a nuclear or hydrogen bomb? And at what distance would such a preemptive strike be safe enough for the planet?
Mathematical modeling has enabled scientists to calculate the lower distance limit for detonating a nuclear warhead in outer space. An asteroid moves with an average speed of 25 kilometers per second, so it should be no closer to the Earth than 464,000 kilometers when a bomb targeting it goes off.
Detractors argue that using such a method would be extremely unwise and fraught with grave implications for the Earth.
Boris Shustov, president of the Astronomy Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences, is one of the opponents. He heads an academic task force set up in Russia to study threats posed by asteroids and comets to the Earth.
In Shustov's view, the best solution would be to make celestial bodies veer off a potentially dangerous course rather than destroying them. He says modifying an asteroid's velocity by just a few centimeters per second would be enough to divert it.
One way of doing so will be to attach a spacecraft with a solar sail shaped like a concave mirror to an asteroid. The sail will focus solar radiation on a small area of the asteroid's surface. Owing to the asteroid's weak gravity, warmed-up substance will quickly evaporate off the surface and the resultant jet thrust will make the rock shift its trajectory.
Another technique involves attaching rocket engines onto the surface of an asteroid itself to activate them when the need arises.
If an attempt to move a large asteroid off course fails, we could then try to provoke its collision with another, smaller asteroid. Such processes happen naturally all the time, resulting in asteroids shifting their orbits.
Unfortunately, such methods are workable only with well-studied asteroids, whose potential impact on the Earth can be predicted at least several years in advance.
A much bigger danger is posed by as yet undiscovered asteroids and so-called long-period celestial bodies, which approach the Earth once in a thousand years or even less often.
The orbits of asteroids may change gradually overtime. Sharp shifts are also possible, for example, in the event of gravitational perturbation by big-sized planets.
Creating a special asteroid interception service and keeping that service on permanent alert will require major investment. Some of its elements should be tried out while implementing current space programs. This way, we could ensure an immediate mobilization of all available means to counter a specific asteroid impact threat as soon as it arises.
Yury Zaitsev is an expert with the Russian Institute for Space Research.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
Comment: Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction! is an excellent article discussing just what we are very likely going to be up against in the not-to-distant future.
sott.net
Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:02 EDT
War, rumors of war, corrupt governments run by psychopaths, phony terrorism, burgeoning police states...but is that all we have to worry about? What if there was something to put it all in context? Or rather, what if there is something else we are missing, something that is beyond the control of even the political and corporate elite; something that is driving them to attempt to herd the global population to an ever finer order of control...
A new sott.net video production:
SOTT's blog on Fireballs and Meteorites.
.
Spaceweather.com
Mon, 29 Oct 2007 18:48 EDT
 |
| Click on above photo for animation. |
The diaphanous and curiously spherical cloud surrounding the comet's core is now large enough to physically swallow the King of Planets!
And that's just for starters. The growing comet subtends an angle (4 arcminutes) as large as the Moon's Sea of Tranquillity. Last night in Higham Ferrers, England, Dave Eagle photographed "the Moon and Comet Holmes with the same setup to show how big this strange comet is."
 |
Although the comet is not as bright as Jupiter or a lunar mare, it is visible to the unaided eye. Look north after sunset for a magnitude +2.5 fuzzball in the constellation Perseus: sky map.
What would make a comet explode in this fashion? Actually, a better question is, what would make a comet explode twice in this fashion? This is the second time Comet 17P/Holmes has erupted. The first was in 1892, an outburst that led to the comet's discovery by British astronomer Edwin Holmes.
The answer may be sinkholes. There is growing evidence that some comets and asteroids may have a porous internal structure akin to, say, swiss cheese or a honycomb. Suppose one of the chambers of the honycomb suddenly collapsed, exposing many square kilometers of fresh cometary ice to sunlight for the first time. A flurry of sublimation would ensue with mega-jets of dusty gas emerging from the sinkhole to create a cloud around the comet much as we see now. Twice = two sinkholes, one in 1892 and one in 2007. (Many readers have asked if the explosion might be a result of a cosmic collision. Perhaps an asteroid hit the comet. While possible, such an event is unlikely to happen once and it is unlikely2 to have happened twice.)
Because no one can see the comet's nucleus--it is small, far away and hidden inside a Jupiter-sized debris cloud--this "explanation" is no more than conjecture. The true events at the core of Comet Holmes remain unknown. Grab your telescope and savor the mystery!
Nicholos Wethington
Universe Today
Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:04
EDT
Tadeusz J. Jopek and his team at the Astronomical Observatory UAM in Poland - in collaboration with the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in France - looked for the possible origins of the Tunguska meteor by essentially running the explosion backwards, and mathematically simulating where the parent object of the event would have been before the impact.
By taking the existing forensic evidence of the impact to estimate the velocity and impact angle of the Tunguska meteorite, the team was able to simulate the possible orbit and speed of the object before it hit the earth. In doing this, they created 3311 virtual "particles" as possible origins of the object.
They then analyzed the orbits of near-earth objects that lie in the most likely region for the past 20,000 years to find possible matches with their simulated particles. It is still unclear exactly where the Tunguska meteor came from, and there are over 130 suspects.
"We believe that TCB originated as the result of a breakup of a single body: a comet or an asteroid. In our study we concluded that it is more probable that it was an asteroid. We cannot point to which one; instead we have found several candidates for the Tunguska parent, and the asteroid 2000 WK63 is an example of it," Dr. Tadeusz said.
This is a hard case to solve indeed, as there remains little physical evidence of the original object near Tunguska, and the only tools astronomers have to work with are mathematical and statistical simulations. The question still remains whether the parent was a comet or asteroid, and indeed if the near-earth object it came from has been discovered yet.
"Such statistical conclusion gives no absolute sure [sic] that one of the presently known asteroids was indeed the Tunguska cosmic body parent. Therefore it is possible that still, the real Tunguska parent body is undiscovered." Dr. Tadeusz said.
0 comments:
Post a Comment