An ACTUAL meteor strike, ACTUALLY caught on ACTUAL CAMERA!!

[DerGolgo]

Seriously.
This happened today. In Tscheljabins, in the Ural mountains in Russia. A place I've actually heard of before!



Most of these rocks fall in the ocean, where there's no one around to notice.
This one couldn't just be seen, it could be heard in a densely populated area!


Heck, it actually blew out people',s doors and windows!!

That warehouse door is so gonna get ebayed...

Here's some science about it:


While earth gets pelted by meteors all the damn time, I'm aware of only one such rock ever being caught on camera as it rubbed against our atmosphere. Whenever they want to illustrate this sort of thing for TV documentaries, they keep trotting out the same grainy 8mm footage from one event back in the seventies.
As the scientist explains, compare to the stuff that happens all the damn time, this is a big one - a once in a decade type of impact!
And not only did it happen where people would witness it, it was caught on multiple cameras! How fucking amazing is that?

According to a bunch of articles in German, Roskosmos (Russian space agency) has calculated that thing to have gone 30 km/second, almost 20 miles per second, and found that it exploded in mid-air.

[Sisyphus]

I saw something pretty similar once, when sailing across the Pacific. I was in the chart house doing something officer-like when I heard everyone else out on deck ooh-ing and aww-ing, and it went on so long I actually walked out and saw a trail going from just above the horizon in front of us, and as I looked up saw it still streaking along in a direction pretty much reciprocal to our course, headed for the opposite horizon. It was FAST.
I remember thinking to myself, "Well, that's it then. Huge fucking wave will kill us in about five minutes." But nothing ever happened. No sonic boom, either. But it scared the crap out of me.

[DerGolgo]

I was just at the bakery and saw the headlines regarding this. Between 100 and 120 injured. I suspect folks who crashed their car or walked into a lamppost looking up and those with a dose of tinnitus from the boom will be among that number.
The yellow press, of course, declared a reason for panic, it could happen to us, too!!
It sucks re the injuries, but apart from that, it's one of the most amazing things that will probably happen in the lifetime of the witnesses. The cosmos dropped in and said hello.

[xtian]

last report I read stated about 950 wounded, mostly shattered glass but a couple of serious injuries.

[DerGolgo]

I just looked it up on google news, injury toll is up to 1200.
Damn, it's not the marvelous spectacle of nature statistics made me think it would be - it's the not worst case (that would have been in the summer, a thousand miles further east with all the forests), but it's an actual natural disaster.
Here's some images of where the chunks of it hit the ground after it exploded and what the pressure wave did:

Harmless:


Fucking not-harmless:




In the middle of a Russian winter, on the doorstep of Siberia, windows like that are a problem - and a common sight in the major city of the area.


Right. Clean up, treat the wounded, assist those hit badly by it. Recognize that there is shit in this universe we can do little about - and that is so god damn unlikely, we probably shouldn't get distracted from more urgent problems. I think the official count of human habitations struck by meteorites was, until now ... one. By a penny sized bit of rock.
Nevertheless, I bet you, scare mongers and politicians looking for something to boost their profile will start demanding a meteorite defense is constructed immediately.
Right now, I bet you, some Pentagon people and private contractors are working out how to modify the missile defense system or anti-satellite weapons to for anti-meteor use, or at least how they can create the appearance that it can be thus modified, to get their hands on some more defense spending pork.
Only a question of time until someone comes up with the brilliant idea of getting rid of the treaties against nuclear weapons in space.
Fuck.
I just hope the death toll remains at naught.

[kitkat]

While earth gets pelted by meteors all the damn time, I'm aware of only one such rock ever being caught on camera as it rubbed against our atmosphere. Whenever they want to illustrate this sort of thing for TV documentaries, they keep trotting out the same grainy 8mm footage from one event back in the seventies.

They catch these sorts of exploding meteors rather frequently actually...google images of "bolide" for numerous examples. But size matters-- and this is the biggest one that has been documented this well for sure. NASA released some DOD data on this derived from a network of infrasound stations and other sources; about 18 meters diameter, 10000 metric tons, composed of rock density 4000kg/cubic meter, entry speed 18-20km/sec, approach angle less than 20degrees, broke up at about 20000meters, air blast estimated at 500kiloton equivalent (20X Hiroshima). Overpressure of the blast wave, based on damage, was between 0.5 and 1psi--greater by a factor of about ten than existing modeling predicts for such an event.

[DerGolgo]

500 kt?? Damn! That's more like over 30 times Little Boy!

And you're right, I didn't realize every man and their mother have a camera these days, obviously there'd be a few more caught on camera.

Also, regarding camera...I'm actually looking forward to what Hollywood may make of this. Probably not a blockbuster, that's been Bruce Willissed and Morgan Freemanned to death, on top of the Sean Connerying, but movie of the week, perhaps. If not Hollywood, then Mosfilm, definitely.

[Mk3]

Sisyphus, where were you in relation to kwajalein atoll/bikini atoll? It might not have been extra-terrestrial, or at least it may have started from CA and then came home to earth after a little trip.

[roadmissile]

Even knowing the statistical improbability I have to admit I was hoping for alien attack...

/RM

[Sisyphus]

Sisyphus, where were you in relation to kwajalein atoll/bikini atoll? It might not have been extra-terrestrial, or at least it may have started from CA and then came home to earth after a little trip.

Not sure what you're getting at. If you're referring to pulse jet technology no, this was not that.

[DerGolgo]

Sisyphus, where were you in relation to kwajalein atoll/bikini atoll? It might not have been extra-terrestrial, or at least it may have started from CA and then came home to earth after a little trip.

Not sure what you're getting at. If you're referring to pulse jet technology no, this was not that.

I think he may probably be referring to testing of missile defense systems or of reentry vehicles for ICBMs.

Also, I just found out an amusing little tidbit as to why exactly there are ever so many videos of the event.
In Russia, getting the choice of bribe or bogus tickets when you're pulled over is more likely than a genuine ticket, and apportioning blame after a crash according to bribe-fu is apparently commonplace. Hence, installing a video camera in your car to show the cop you can actually prove your innocence is equally commonplace.
The most spectacular video evidence of the cosmos around us saying hello, courtesy of bent cops. Lovely, innit?

[Sisyphus]

Sisyphus, where were you in relation to kwajalein atoll/bikini atoll? It might not have been extra-terrestrial, or at least it may have started from CA and then came home to earth after a little trip.

Not sure what you're getting at. If you're referring to pulse jet technology no, this was not that.

I think he may probably be referring to testing of missile defense systems or of reentry vehicles for ICBMs.

I was thinking about the recent (like within the last 10 years) development of ultra high speed pulse-jet type craft the US has been experimenting with. Allegedly they built one (IIRC) that was manned and was able to cirumnavigate the entire globe in something like ten minutes or something ridiculous like that. Bizzarre, yes, I know, but I remember seeing something a few years ago about it. There was imagery of the earth taken from a weather satellite that accidentally showed evenly spaced puffs of smoke (?) in a straight line, going from west to east apparently, in the lower latitudes in the northern hemisphere. Between the last half dozen or so puffs there was a faint contrail.
And area 51 where they developed things like the U2, the stealth fighters and bombers, etc, is around 37N latitude. Bikini atoll is around 10 north.
Anyway, yeah.

[DerGolgo]

Pulsejet related threadjack. Ignore.

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A craft that circumnavigates the earth near the surface, in the upper atmosphere or thereabouts? Such a craft would probably have to expend more energy on overcoming the enormous centrifugal force (yes, I know, but how else will you describe the effective force that applies??) than on propulsion. In low earth orbit, the shuttle takes a positively pedestrian 90 minutes to go around. Go faster than the shuttle and the orbital period actually increases, as you move further out the faster you go, all the way to geostationary. Go faster than that, and the earth starts overtaking you.

Hm...now I feel the need for math, dammit.

The earth's mean radius at the equator is 6,378.1 km, add 80 km for altitude that's still in the atmosphere, of sorts, 6,458 km, 6,458,000 m.
That gives a circumference of 40,576 km. To cover that in ten minutes, you need to go 243,460 km/h, or 67,627 m/s.
I can't be bothered working out the angular velocity (I always hated radians), but the internet provides, doesn't it.
According to that, g-forces aboard that pulse-jet would be 72g, subtract 1g for earth gravity pulling the other way, that poor pilot would weigh 71 times what he weighed at breakfast. If that pulse-jet was indeed manned, it was manned only once, and only for a very brief period of time.

I'm not saying it's impossible, going around the globe in an hour at that altitude would only cause about 2g, subtracting earth gravity, that pilot would just be sitting upside down quite happily (unless they build the plane to fly that way around to begin with, I dunno what sitting upside down for an hour does to you, but I suspect it's not nice).
Since the 1950s, here and there, some people have proposed arming ICBMs with tungsten rods as kinetic kill vehicles, for instant retribution without having to wait the hours and hours it takes a bomber or even a cruise missile to get to a distant target, but without having to go nuclear. Had anyone come up with an engine that could shove a plane around the world in an hour, it wouldn't make sense to keep the rapid responses this enables a secret. The point is that your enemies fear you, so that they don't do shit to begin with. Having a dagger up your sleeve may be useful in war, but constant domination of the world stage is a different matter. Currently, to keep up that domination, the USA is spending billions and billions every year for all those carrier groups constantly keeping watch on distant corners of the globe. So that, if necessary, the US can bomb anyone who acts up within a day or so. If a super plane that fast existed, all of that, more even, could be achieved without a single boat in a single ocean, just from an airbase somewhere in the middle of the US. Just to get the republicans to cut defense spending, or just so that the Air Force can get one over on the Navy, someone would have revealed that such amazing capabilities exist.

I recall reading about pulsejets and super secret super secret squirrel planes like that since the 1990s. Surely, they played around with some truly top-secret stuff, like drones and stuff, but had they actually come up with a game changer like that, it would probably have gotten out by now. Anything that goes around the earth must, by definition, at some point cross the airspace of someone else. Not moving in space but where there's actually some atmosphere for that jet to breathe, they would have been picked up by radar and the clever sensors that pick up sonic booms. Not to mention that, traveling at more than twice the speed of that rock what hit Russia, they would have been about twice as visible. No stealth technology can hide air glowing white hot from that sort of friction. If there was, indeed, a ridiculously fast plane, even one not quite as fast as that, and had that plane flown more than once, more people would have noticed, wouldn't they. These people would have been military, most likely, watching airspace and all that. Complaints would have been made, diplomats would eventually have gotten involved. Diplomats who would have been briefed that, not only must they deny any US involvement in that ghost plane, they must do their darndest to make sure information about that plane doesn't leak to the public.
And then Wikileaks would have unmasked all of that.

I suspect most of the stuff that's been going on at Nellis and other places like that in the last two decade or so has been testing of fairly mundane weapon systems, upgrades and new tricks for existing weapons and planes and developing drones. I further suspect that the vast majority of "evidence" for super planes being tested can actually be explained in quite mundane ways, and the few that are actually down to secret hardware will really not be that much different from effects cause by un-secret machines.

[Mk3]

I was referring to the regular missile testing in that area. When the RV comes in it streaks just like a meteor, it just doesn't break up prematurely. As for the rest of the tinfoil hat business, I'll leave that to DG; but you can pull an awful lot of Gs without a pilot, just sayin.

[Sisyphus]

Recently they've developed molecular structures that can bend light, hinting at the ability to make something invisible. Nobody saw that coming ten years ago, either.
Still, I'll believe it when I see it. Or not. Whatever.

[DerGolgo]

Threadjack continues.

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Recently they've developed molecular structures that can bend light, hinting at the ability to make something invisible. Nobody saw that coming ten years ago, either.
Still, I'll believe it when I see it. Or not. Whatever.

Yep, true, that they did. And that's the next big thing, invisible tanks and perhaps invisible soldiers. So you can do in broad daylight what right now you can only do at night.
But none of that is in any great conflict with known laws of nature, as the practicability of a pulsejet would be.
Note that, while battlefield invisibility is probably the mother, father and creepy uncle of the holy grails of military technology, and while that is a technology that would perhaps be more useful to keep secret, so that you can put a whole new meaning to "covert ops", we still got to read about it in WIRED and other such publications.

As regards fast airplanes, the top of the heap appears to be what the aptly named "Reaction Engines" have developed, a jet engine that runs on liquid hydrogen. Effectively the sort of rocket engine we all know from the Ariane rocket, but that breathes air. Took them about thirty years to develop, they reckon they can go mach 6 with that puppy. Normal turbojet engines would explode before getting close to that, what with the pressure inside the engine climbing not with thrust but with the speed at which the air goes in.
Mach 6 is about the speed the X-15 managed, really just a rocket, but with stubby wings, so technically an airplane.
The people at Reaction Engines are working on an SSTO satellite launcher, a literal spaceplane, but prompted by Brussels bureaucrats who'd like to take their secretaries on a weekend trip to Australia, have also done the math on a plane that could go at mach 6 from Brussels to Australia. Over the fucking North Pole, so it doesn't have to slow down for going over inhabited land. With their engine, that's doable.
There's another reason to doubt that a game-changing ultra-fast plane that can circle the earth in single digit hours exists. If it did, Boeing or one of Boeing's subsidiaries would have to be involved, at least if it's a US project. Right now, Singapore Airlines uses an Airbus for the longest direct-flight on the planet, the 18 hour haul from Singapore to Newark. They'd like to grab all that business for themselves, with the 777 and the Dreamliner, and they have seen once before what happens when you make air travel a few times faster and one plane can suddenly do the job of many. It's what happened when the 707 replaced the Super Constellation and other propeller aircraft, such a super-fast plane with actual long-distance capabilities (unlike Concorde) could do the same again. Sure, fuel would be a question, which is why the idea of using hydrogen like with the Reaction Engines reaction engine appeals. But anything that could do the whole planet in around an hour? That would have to be utlra-efficient fuel wise, as you can hardly alight in something the size of an oil-tanker, as it would have to be with traditional hydrocarbon energy sources. Even if such technology can only work supersonic, it would still have to be a lot less thirsty per mile than existing planes. Running costs are the a, b, c and all the other letters of the alphabet for the airlines, it's why even BOAC would rather buy Boeing than Vickers.
Being able to outrun the competition on the trans-pacific and other trans-oceanic routes, being able to haul many more paying passengers by just doing the run in much less time, passengers who'd even pay a bit more for the short flight, thus being able to operate cost efficiently, all of that would be what such a super secret secret squirrel piece of airplane technology would have to be able to do. No matter how many stamps of Top Secret the Air Force, Pentagon, CIA or anyone else were to put on that, Boeing owns way to many senators to let that opportunity to grab a vast chunk of the airline business pretty much without any competition slip through their hands.

[Sisyphus]

The possibility exists. I don't have a problem with that. The desire is there, I can understand that. The implications of the ability to go that fast for ANY reason? I have no idea, but then again I don't sit around all day thinking what good it would do me.
I don't think someone sat around one day and thought, "I know, I'll just dream up some whacky conspiracy about supersickcrazyfast airships, and then doctor a few photos to prove my point." Nope. All my nope. It doesn't require a suspension of belief to consider that if some interest was so motivated, they'd find a way.
After all, we put a man on the moon. Didn't we?

[DerGolgo]

Threadjack continues further.

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Yes, the possibility does exist ... but it's exceptionally remote, and with the circumstances for keeping that secret I described, a bit more remote even.
Actually, some people do sit down and dream up wacky conspiracy theories. They just don't see it that way. They get a crazy idea, like that the US may have developed a super secret super secret squirrel plane. Rather than look at the evidence to make up their mind that such a plane exists, or doesn't, they collect "evidence", clues they decide must prove their theory, regardless of any alternative explanations. They already "know" the truth, right, so it all fits nicely into their closed worldview, anyone who doesn't see it is a sheep or in on the conspiracy! That sort of thing is a common thread with the moon-hoax nutjobs. Yes, we did land on the moon. It was a decade long effort, at the cutting edge of science and technology, conducted in the public spotlight where the technology and the math behind that theory could be examined by anyone. In the 1950s, as rocket technology began to take off, folks like von Braun worked out that, indeed, you could build an enormous rocket that could carry a big payload as far lunar orbit. That payload could be big enough to include a lander, life support, and stuff for getting home again. It was mostly a matter of working out the engineering details. Challenging work, truly.
Also, it should be possible to build an airplane that goes Mach 6 or a lot faster - all you'd need is a rocket engine. You wouldn't be able to go very far, because air resistance will have you running out of fuel in quite a hurry, conservation of energy, you can't argue with that sort of thing. The Saturn 5 needed it's entire first stage, 5 million pounds of the 6.2 million pounds the whole thing weighed, just to get to 67 km altitude and about mach 6. Other rockets don't even bother going faster than mach 2 on their way up - it's a waste of fuel if you're only headed for LOE.
Conventional air-breathing jet engines, or even highly unusual air-breathing jet engines, they can only handle so much pressure before any material known to man will rip apart. Ramjet engines are a different matter, and have been well researched, but they don't work well above Mach 6, either, because things just get too hot and pressure gets too high for air to stay, you know, air, chemistry starts acting different under those conditions.
Even the Reaction Engines engine, which supercools incoming air to almost-but-not-quite liquid state and then pumps it into a rocket-engine style combustion chamber is limited to Mach 6 or so. According to the research company that developed it and would have quite a bit of incentive for overstating the engine's capability, to goad investors.
Who knows, someone may find a way past all of this, someone may have already done so, but it's unlikely they'd be able to keep it a secret, and it's unlikely with what is known about the physics of the matter. Unlike the rockets and computers of the Apollo program, which were only a lot bigger and a lot more advanced than their predecessors, but not fundamentally different, going that fast in the atmosphere requires a whole different set of tricks. As for building the much more advanced and much bigger versions of previously existing technology, it took NASA a massive effort for almost a decade to get there, a similarly large effort, large compared to other efforts in that field of engineering if not quite as large as the Apollo program, would probably be required for building airplanes a lot faster than mach 6. Going around the world on one tank of fuel is something which only Burt Rutan seems to be able to do so far, both planes that did it that I'm aware off were designed by him, and were fairly slow even by regular airplane standards.
The moon landing is one of the reasons for many conspiracy theories. Those who agree that man actually walked on the moon can't believe that we haven't figured out how to do certain other things.

[MATPOC]

back to meteorite and injuries, I recon most of them could have been avoided. My guess is that right after the sky lit up everyone rushed to the window to see the event, just as the blast wave reached their area and shattered the glass right in their faces.

Tunguska "event" happened not far from this recent one, that was the largest strike (or non strike) in recent history, well studied and recorded

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

and here's another one, this was probably big enough to change a climate for a while

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Quebec" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[kitkat]

Two hypersonic projects are currently quite real, one by Boeing (X-51A) and the other by DARPA (HTV-2). the latter got briefly to mach 20 which is about 1/3 the speed of the typical meteor on entry. The former is a mach 5 craft and is a scramjet, the latter is a guided glider. Both are following fast in the footprints of liquid fueled rocket programs (via instant entropy lol!). The motivation is delivery of weapons systems, on a global basis, faster than anyone else. The big conspiracy deal a couple decades ago revolved around a totally mythical craft called "Aurora" which was supposedly a mach 8 manned spyplane.

The record re-entry speed where the craft survived in one piece was the comet probe Stardust which re-entered at less than 1/2 the speed of the russian meteor (8km/sec vs 18km/sec for the latter). Nothing made by god or man can survive re-entry at speeds anywhere near typical for a meteor entry.

[DerGolgo]

They found bits of it, btw:


And the threadjack plays on.

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A "glider" that needs an ICBM (Minotaur launcher is a de-militarized Peacekeeper missile) to get going. An ICBM built to haul 10 warheads, that's about the biggest size they make or made solid fuel rockets, isn't it. Quite a ways from a jet, pulse or otherwise, but gimmicks like this one would be one possible explanation for some of the stuff the tinfoil hat crowd get so excited about. But, honestly, this is one technology you cannot keep a secret. Nope, can't be done. In the fifties, maybe, but not when the whole surface of the planet is constantly being monitored by satellites which make up the early warning systems of Russia and probably also China. These things can spot a big rocket engine going off, it's infrared signature, it's how a "launch warning" is generated for the nuclear forces to respond to. That is one of the reasons why the US notifies the Russians each time they want to launch something into space, why everyone is notifying everyone else before they launch something. A missile launched from the continental US, where there still are minuteman silos, would be especially notification worthy. When such notification failed in 1995, and a sounding rocket launched from Norway reached the sort of altitude US SLBMs also reach, the Russian nuclear forces were put on alert. If they found out about a "secret" rocket launch for a glider like that, they would still go very fucking apeshit, so one way or the other of keeping it secret sounds unlikely.

However, going that fucking fast ... you all know about the Shkval and the Barracuda, supercavitation torpedoes, right? These things can go several hundred mph under water by forcing apart the water in front of them, creating a cavity around their body, thus avoiding friction.
I recall hearing about the Russians having worked out a way to do that ... with airplanes. Not using a blunt nose like the Barracuda, but by somehow turning the air into a plasma at the nose of the plane and then using an electrical field to guide it around the plane's body. How the wings would work then was either not explained or I don't recall it. BUT one of the problems of hypersonic flight appears to be that, at those sorts of speeds above mach 6, the friction forces air molecules to dissociate and turn into a plasma. Hence comes that extra bright glow, doesn't it. A tinfoil hat idea, truly, but an intriguing one. If I had to design a super secret hypersonic spyplane for the reptilian overlords that run the UN, that's how I'd do it.

[Mk3]

MATPOC wants us all to refocus, because the rock DG posted hit his grandma in the butt. She's very upset, lightly bruised, and his borscht won't cook itself.

[DerGolgo]

True, true. Especially considering how he's showing his true colors here. To whit:

Tunguska "event" happened not far from this recent one, that was the largest strike (or non strike) in recent history, well studied and recorded

"Not far from this one". Yep, totally not far. For a Russian. For everyone else, a difference in longitude of 40° is quite fucking far.
I've just looked it up on google earth. While unimaginable for Eurotrash like me, even for our American brethren, 1500 miles surely is far.
Darn Russians, occupying 11% of the world's land surface, they don't speak the same language when it comes to distance as the rest of us. Seattle would be "no far" from Chicago for them, Cairo "isn't far" from Prague, Lima "isn't far" from Caracas ...

[MATPOC]

I make 1500 mile track to Florida on a whim and in 24 hours...

[Mk3]

its different though, because in Russia, you don't travel to 1500mi away, 1500mi away travels to you.

[MATPOC]

1500 miles in a country that spans 8 time zones.... takes a week to cross it on the train

[Jaeger]

1500 miles in a country that spans 8 time zones.... takes a week to cross it on the train

Yeah, one of the few countries that tops us on just being so goddamn big. The other two are Canada (#2) and China (#3).

Country SqKm (SqMiles)
Russia 17,098,242 (6,601,668)
Canada 9,984,670 (3,855,100)
China 9,706,961 (3,747,879)
U.S.A. 9,629,091 (3,717,813)

--Jaeger

[DerGolgo]

1500 miles in a country that spans 8 time zones.... takes a week to cross it on the train

What did I say about bragging rights? Which brings me to another point why, to any sane, rational person (you know, not a Russian ... mad they are. Magnificent, but quite mad.), a place 40° away would be considered "far". Because, as it happens, time is offset by about 4 minutes for every degree of longitude. So over the site of the Tunguska event, the sun rises about two hours and twenty minutes before it rises over this place. If, in one place, everyone is already arriving at work while, at the same moment in the other place, most will still be fast asleep, those places would be a bit far for most denizens of this ball.

[MATPOC]

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskyis one of the larger eastern outposts of the country, they were always mentioned in evening news or any radio call. You'd often hear "Moscow time is 4PM, Pertopavlovsk Kamchatdkiy Midnight", it was a running joke since they are 8 hours ahead of us it's always night when we are up and working.