Meteor explodes over Russia, nearly 1,000 injured

[ariete]

what ...

[Geo]

Why do you think we've been lucky to be incorporated into the Catholic Church at such a young age?

[JarlWolf]

 

Never grew up with faith personally, never found a reason to believe in it. But that's just my opinion.

If anything, I think it'd be less of a god "saving" us and more of finally taking their laxatives and getting rid of their constipation: In a most explosive, high velocity matter.

[Geo]

Yes, it's often difficult to communicate with Ariete.

As on believing, youth in say the more extreme socialist countries are required to accept lots of dogmas on good faith as well.

As long as one's able to get rid of excess bagage, no harm done.

[ariete]

yeah i know my difficulties in interfactional relations 

anyway religions or not there's always someone who must say us how we must live and think ... lucky is because we live today in a part of world where we can decide, always with discretion, ''what belive'' and ''how live'' despite the dogmas ... for now.

even if dogmas are difficult to remove, expecially for old-lowinstructed people, who catalyze dogmas in deep, we should cancel the unconscious, the human component which suggest us how thinking and how acting in the situations, opening ourselves to all what is might be possible, just like this we can know/understand much things that we know now.

[Buster's Uncle]

One Year Later, Russian Meteor Strike Sparks Asteroid Deflection Talks
SPACE.com
by Elizabeth Howell, SPACE.com Contributor  9 hours ago



A year after the Chelyabinsk meteor slammed into the atmosphere above Russia, the world's space agencies have a new plan to address asteroid threats — including a possible mission to move an asteroid.

The newly formed Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG, pronounced "same page") bills itself as Earth's first line of technological defense if an asteroid threatens. Before that ever happens, however, the coalition aims to create space missions to explore the possibility of moving asteroids around to prove potential technologies that could one day protect Earth.

"SMPAG will also develop and refine a set of reference missions that could be individually or cooperatively flown to intercept an asteroid," Detlef Koschny, an official in the European Space Agency's Space Situational Awareness Program office, said in a statement.

"These include precursor missions or test and evaluation missions, which we need to fly to prove technology before a real threat arises," added Koschny, who heads the near-Earth object segment of the office.

Asteroid impacts received renewed public attention after an estimated 10,000-ton meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia on Feb. 15, 2013. The 55-foot (17 meters) object smashed windows and caused hundreds of injuries, scattering space rock bits across the region. The largest fragment recovered so far was about the size of a coffee table.

SMPAG — formed in 2013 out of the activities of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space — had its first meetings Feb. 6 and 7 at ESA's operations center in Darmstadt, Germany.

Once the group gets itself organized, it will coordinate its activities with the International Asteroid Warning Network. That network will helm the search for asteroids and other space objects that threaten the Earth, while SMPAG will focus on the space missions and technology needed to address the threat.


http://news.yahoo.com/one-later-russian-meteor-strike-sparks-asteroid-deflection-121616226.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Winter Olympic Gold Medalists to Get Bonus Meteorite Medal Saturday
SPACE.com
By Robert Z. Pearlman, collectSPACE.com  9 hours ago



Olympic athletes placing gold on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014 at the Sochi Winter Games will be conferred a bonus medal adorned with a fragment of the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteorite.



What is better than winning gold at the Olympics? Winning gold at the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia on Saturday (Feb. 15) — because on that day, and that day alone, earning a gold medal also means being awarded a piece of a rock that fell from space.

Saturday marks exactly one year since a small near-Earth asteroid entered the Earth's atmosphere over Russia and exploded over the Chelyabinsk Oblast (region). Regarded as the most widely witnessed asteroid strike in modern history, the Chelyabinsk meteor was also the largest recorded natural object to have fallen from space since 1908.

The space rock broke into hundreds, if not thousands, of small fragments, which rained down over the area's snow-covered fields. Over the past year, many fragments of the Chelyabinsk meteorite have been recovered, with some of the pieces heading to labs for study, many landing on the collectors' market, others going to museums and a small set being placed aside for a special set of medallions.

Ten of those medals will be presented to those who place gold at the Sochi 2014 Olympics on the anniversary of the Chelyabinsk meteor fall.

"We will hand out our medals to all the athletes who will win gold on that day [Feb. 15], because both the meteorite strike and the Olympic Games are global events," Alexei Betekhtin, culture minister for the Chelyabinsk region, in a statement.

In total, 50 of the meteorite-adorned medallions have been minted. In addition to the those that will be awarded to the Olympic committees of those nations whose athletes win gold medals Saturday, one is being given to the regional Chelyabinsk museum, another will stay in Sochi and the remainder will be offered to private collections.

The medallions, which were crafted out of gold and silver, feature a design that was inspired by the footage of the meteor's fall as captured by car-mounted dash cams. The videos from that day quickly went viral, shared across the planet by social media.

The meteorite pieces are affixed in a small indentation at the center of the medals.

The meteorite medals are not replacing the Olympic gold medals awarded to athletes on Saturday, contrary to some media reports. The Chelyabinsk medals will be presented to the athletes separately and not as part of the traditional podium ceremony.

The 10 meteorite-embedded awards will be bestowed to the gold medal athletes competing in speedskating (men's 1500), short-track speedskating (women's 1000 and men's 1500), cross-country skiing (women's relay), ski jumping (men's K-125), Alpine skiing (women's super giant slalom) and skeleton (men's) events.

Today, small fragments (2 to 3 grams) of the Chelyabinsk meteorite sell for $50 to $75. Larger fragments (between 5 and 10 grams) typically sell for $200 and above.

The shock wave from the meteor damaged thousands of buildings in the Chelyabinsk Oblast, resulting in more than 1,500 people seeking medical help. Injuries ranged from cuts due to shattered glass windows, eye pain due to the brightness of the flash, ultraviolet burns and, in one of two serious injuries reported, a broken spine.

The damage from the meteor explosion was estimated by the oblast's governor to be more than one billion rubles (or about $33 million US).

http://news.yahoo.com/winter-olympic-gold-medalists-bonus-meteorite-medal-saturday-121624146.html

[Geo]

gone.

[Buster's Uncle]

?

[Geo]

I made an erroneous post, and used something else then "deleted" to tell ghe forum.

[Buster's Uncle]

Russian Meteor Blast Thrust Asteroid Danger into Spotlight 1 Year Ago Today
SPACE.com
by Mike Wall, Senior Writer  8 hours ago



A meteor seen flying over Russia on Feb. 15 at 3:20: 26 UTC impacted Chelyabinsk. Preliminary information is that this object was unrelated to asteroid 2012 DA14, which made a safe pass by Earth on the same day.



One year later, the impact of the surprise Russian meteor explosion is still being felt all over the world.

On Feb. 15, 2013, a 65-foot-wide (20 meters) asteroid detonated in the skies over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, causing millions of dollars of damage and injuring 1,500 people. The dramatic event served as a wake-up call, many scientists say, alerting the world to the dangers posed by the millions of space rocks that reside in Earth's neck of the cosmic woods.

"These types of events are no longer hypothetical," David Kring, of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, said in December at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. "We've been up here talking about these types of things for years, but now the entire world understands that they can be real."


Caught off guard

The asteroid that caused the Russian fireball came streaking into Earth's atmosphere shortly after dawn one year ago today, exploding about 14 miles (23 kilometers) above the ground.



Impact site of the main mass of the Chelyabinsk meteorite in the ice of Lake Chebarkul. Image released Nov. 6, 2013


The blast generated a shock wave that hit the city of Chelyabinsk within a minute or two, breaking thousands of windows. (Shards of flying glass caused most of the injuries.)

Chelyabinsk "was the first asteroid-impact disaster in human history," Clark Chapman, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said at the December AGU meeting. "Nobody was killed, but nonetheless, the early estimates of the total damage of several tens of millions of dollars ranks it with a typical United States presidentially-declared major disaster."

Adding to the celestial drama, the Chelyabinsk impact occurred on the same day that a 100-foot-wide (30 m) space rock called 2012 DA14 cruised within 17,200 miles (27,000 km) of Earth, coming closer than many communications satellites circling our planet.

Scientists knew about 2012 DA14 and had predicted its close approach. But the Russian fireball caught everybody off-guard, as the asteroid that caused it had escaped detection until its dying day.

And there are plenty of other space rocks like the Chelyabinsk object out there, cruising unnamed and unknown through the dark depths of space. Indeed, scientists have catalogued just 10,600 near-Earth asteroids out of a total population believed to number in the millions.



Fragments of Chelyabinsk (C2 - C6) analyzed in this study. Find locations are marked. C2 is an oriented meteorite; it travelled with its flat side forward. Its backside is shown. Image released Nov. 6, 2013.


For decades, researchers have been saying that they need more money and more instruments to start filling in the big gaps on the near-Earth asteroid map. And Chelyabinsk gave them a powerful example with which to augment their argument.


A lasting impact

The events of Feb. 15, 2013 got the attention of power brokers as well as the general public, said David Morrison of NASA's Ames Research Center and the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute.

"There was a planetary defense conference that was, by coincidence, scheduled for two months after Chelyabinsk," Morrison said during a public lecture in Silicon Valley in November. "We had had mostly geeky engineers and scientists at these conferences — until this one, when two high-ranking people from FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] came and spent the whole time there to begin to study what the civil-defense or disaster implications would be of impacts like this."

And a few weeks after the fireball, he added, the Russian and United States militaries began talking about how to work together to find and defend Earth against hazardous asteroids.



The asteroid that exploded near Chelyabinsk, Russia on Feb. 15, 2013 has provided scientists new insights into the risks of smaller asteroid impacts. This 3D simulation of the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion by Mark Boslough was rendered by Brad


Further, the U.S. Congress held several hearings about planetary defense in the aftermath of Chelyabinsk, and the Obama adminstration asked Congress to double NASA's asteroid-hunting budget, to $40 million.

Finally, last June, NASA announced that it was launching an asteroid "Grand Challenge," which would solicit ideas from industry, academia and the general public about the best ways to detect potentially hazardous asteroids and prevent them from hitting Earth.

The extra attention could help new instruments such as the privately funded Sentinel Space Telescope get off the ground. The nonprofit B612 Foundation is developing the infrared Sentinel, which it plans to launch to a Venus-like orbit in 2018. From there, the scope should be able to spot 500,000 new asteroids in less than six years of operation, officials say.

"We have the technology to deflect asteroids, but we cannot do anything about the objects we don’t know exist," B612 Foundation chairman and CEO Ed Lu, a former NASA astronaut, wrote in a blog post shortly after Chelyabinsk.


http://news.yahoo.com/russian-meteor-blast-thrust-asteroid-danger-spotlight-1-125117043.html

[Geo]

Chelyabinsk "was the first asteroid-impact disaster in human history,"...

Has this guy forgotten about Tunguska?

[Buster's Uncle]

Chelyabinsk asteroid crashed in space before hitting Earth: scientists
Reuters
By Irene Klotz  May 23, 2014 3:41 PM



The trail of a falling object is seen above a residential apartment block in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk, in this still image taken from video shot on February 15, 2013. REUTERS/OOO Spetszakaz



CAPE CANAVERAL Fla. (Reuters) - An asteroid that exploded last year over Chelyabinsk, Russia, leaving more than 1,000 people injured by flying glass and debris, collided with another asteroid before hitting Earth, new research by scientists shows.

Analysis of a mineral called jadeite that was embedded in fragments recovered after the explosion show that the asteroid's parent body struck a larger asteroid at a relative speed of some 3,000 mph (4,800 kph).

"This impact might have separated the Chelyabinsk asteroid from its parent body and delivered it to the Earth," lead researcher Shin Ozawa, with the University of Tohoku in Japan, wrote in a paper published this week in the journal Scientific Reports.

The discovery is expected to give scientists more insight into how an asteroid may end up on a collision course with Earth. Scientists suspect the collision happened about 290 million years ago.

Most of the 65-foot (20-meter) wide asteroid that blazed over Chelyabinsk in southwestern Siberia on Feb. 15, 2013, was incinerated in a bright fireball, the result of frictional heating as it dropped through the atmosphere at 42,000 mph (67,600 kph). But many small fragments survived.



Workers repair damage caused after a meteorite passed above the Urals city of Chelyabinsk February 15, 2013. REUTERS/Yevgeni Yemeldinov


The asteroid was traveling almost 60 times the speed of sound and exploded about 18 miles (30 km) above ground with a force nearly 30 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945 in World War Two.

The blast over Chelyabinsk caused shock waves that destroyed buildings and shattered windows. More than 1,000 people were injured by flying debris.

Analysis of recovered Chelyabinsk meteorites revealed an unusual form of jadeite entombed inside glassy materials known as shock veins, which form after rock crashes, melts and re-solidifies.

Jadeite, which is one of the minerals in the gemstone jade, forms only under extreme pressure and high temperature. The form of jadeite found in the Chelyabinsk meteorites indicates that the asteroid’s parent body hit another asteroid that was at least 492 feet (150 meters) in diameter.

Scientists are still analyzing fragments of the asteroid and calculating its precise path toward Earth.



A Russian policeman works near an ice hole, said by the Interior Ministry department for Chelyabinsk region to be the point of impact of a meteorite seen earlier in the Urals region, at lake Chebarkul some 80 kilometers (50 miles) west of Chelyabinsk February 15, 2013. REUTERS/Chelyabinsk region Interior Ministry/Handout


In an email to Reuters, Ozawa described the Chelyabinsk meteorite as "a unique sample.”

"It is a near-Earth object that actually hit the Earth, and its trajectory was well-recorded,” Ozawa wrote.

The Chelyabinsk asteroid caused the second most powerful explosion in recorded history. In 1908, a suspected asteroid exploded with a force about 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb, leveling some 80 million trees over 772 square miles (2,000 square km) near Russia’s Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia.

The first possible meteorites from the so-called Tunguska event were recovered just last year. Results have not yet been published.

(Editing by Grant McCool)

http://news.yahoo.com/chelyabinsk-asteroid-crashed-space-hitting-earth-scientists-194132305.html

...

Grant McCool?

Really?

[Geo]

He's a grand cool lad?

[Buster's Uncle]

Probably.  It just sounds so made-up a name.

Wolf Blitzer was like that covering the First Oil Crusade in 1991, too...