Bolides, Comets, Asteroids, Meteors And Falling Skies

[Hervé]

To clarify some of the terminology:

A meteoroid/asteroid is some piece of rock/matter orbiting in space which turns into a meteor/fire ball/bolide when heated while going through some atmosphere and can, from there, either:

• completely burn,
• explode,
• turn into a meteorite when - hitting the ground - some remains can be found
• or else escape back to space as a hot meteoroid/asteroid...

[Hervé]

...

Well... Mars does have some atmosphere...


Bizarre smooth metallic meteorite spotted by Mars rover (PHOTOS)

Published time: 2 Nov, 2016 13:05
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© JPL-Caltech / MSSS / NASA - NASA’S Mars Curiosity rover has found a miniscule metallic meteorite, dubbed the ‘Egg Rock’, on the surface of the red planet. The white dots are laser-zap points.

The snap of the peculiar space rock was captured by Curiosity on October 31 and shared by scientists at Arizona State University, who are working with NASA.

It’s believed the meteorite consists of nickel iron, according to the researchers who analyzed the images taken via the ChemCam Remote Micro-Imager device.

© JPL-Caltech / LANL / NASA

The smoothness of its surface and its deep grooves suggest the meteorite became molten as it entered Mars’ atmosphere before then hardening again on hitting the planet’s surface.

Mars’ close vicinity to the asteroid belt coupled with a thin atmosphere which provides less friction for incoming space rocks means it’s not uncommon to find meteorites on the planet.

Curiosity’s predecessor the Spirit Rover found a number of meteorites during its Mars mission, while Curiosity found its first iron meteorite, named Lebanon, two years ago.

Lebanon measured about 2 meters (6.5ft) wide, significantly larger than the ‘Egg Rock’.

NASA said in a statement at the time that iron meteorites dominated the type of space rocks found on Mars.

“Part of the explanation could come from the resistance of iron meteorites to erosion processes on Mars,” the space agency explained.

Curiosity landed on the red planet in 2012 on a mission to determine whether Mars was ever capable of supporting microbial life. The rover is currently on route to the base of the planet’s Mount Sharp peak.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2lMFPwNPF0w

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The smoothness of its surface and its deep grooves suggest the meteorite became molten as it entered Mars’ atmosphere before then hardening again on hitting the planet’s surface.

I am not sure how they do that? Because if it's already molten upon impact it would splash around in droplets... add to that some additional heat from impact... and the result should be similar to tektite shapes...

Hopefully the article's author meant "atmospheric ablation" and should read as something like:

The smoothness of its surface and its deep grooves suggest the meteorite [surface] became molten as it entered Mars’ atmosphere before then hardening again on hitting the planet’s surface.

[Star Tsar]

American Meteor Society

Event 4239 - 2016 | Fireball Over Pennsylvania | 1st November 2016 @ 8:15pm EDT

Published 2nd November 2016 by Vincent Perlerin



The AMS has received over 270 reports so far from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Connecticut, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Michigan, Massachusetts, Delaware & Ontario (Canada).

More information here:http://www.amsmeteors.org/2016/11/fi...-pennsylvania/

[Star Tsar]

NASA & FEMA Hold Asteroid Emergency Exercise

Published 4th November 2016



What would we do if we discovered that a large asteroid was on a course to impact Earth? While highly unlikely, that was the high-consequence scenario discussed by attendees @ an 25th October NASA-FEMA tabletop exercise held in El-Segundo, California.

Read about it here if you wish:http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...teroid20161104

[TargeT]

Posted by NASA
While highly unlikely,

Uh, except it's already happened, like a lot.... This is the one thing the "fear porn" media SHOULD be ALL OVER... but, there's no company to profit i guess? I"m sure someone could squeeze some money out of this... haha, greed is about the only way anything seems to get done anymore.

[Star Tsar]

Huge Southern Taurid Fireball Over Portugal

Iberian Peninsula | 5th November 2016 21:54 CET

Published 6th November 2016 By Carlos Saraiva

Futher data here:http://meteornews.org/huge-southern-...ball-portugal/

[Star Tsar]

Sott.net

Fireball Spotted In The Sky Over Nova Scotia | Dominion Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada | 9th November 2016 @ 16:40



Published 10th November 2016

Yesterday, at precisely 4:40pm, flames raced towards earth over Dominion Cape Breton. Luckily for us, Corinne Reid had a camera handy and snapped some amazing photos.

Read about it here: https://www.sott.net/article/333493-...er-Nova-Scotia

[Star Tsar]

Den Of Lore

Episode 7 | Charles P. O'Dale - Younger Dryas Extinction Impact Event

Published 10th November 2016

We have live in studio meteor impact researcher, Charles P. O'Dale, live in studio to discuss his work researching The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, and to discuss his research on meteor/comet impacts in North America.

If you're a fan of Randall Carlson, Charles would be considered his Canadian equivalent in his search for knowledge on how meteor impacts have affected the North American continent.

Charles P. O'Dale
---------------------------
Charle's scientific study of impact structures began only about 50 years ago. Like any kid, he spent hours looking at the craters on the Moon through his old telescope. Would he ever get a chance to explore a crater? Well since retirement, he has combined his hobbies of astronomy, geology and flying to explore impact craters and structures in North America from the air and ground.

While studying the physics of impact sites, Charles has found that circular geological features can be produced by a number of geological processes, including igneous activity (diatremes, maars, calderas, volcanoes, or syenite/plutons), dissolution and collapse of salt or carbonate rocks by groundwater (dolines), salt or shale diapirism, regional tectonism (circular fold-interference patterns or stratified circular features), glaciation (kettle holes), carbonate mounds, and by meteorite impacts.

His science background plus the experience gleaned from his past profession of semiconductor failure analysis has given him the incentive to document his analysis of these craters and structures.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XgVcWP6MmVY

[Star Tsar]

The Largest Chondrite Ever Found In Clarendon, Texas - 760 lb Meteorite

Published 11th November 2016



DeeDee and Frank Hommel pose with the 760 pound (345 kilogram) Clarendon meteorite discovered on their land. The stony meteorite may be the second largest single chondrite ever found in the United States.

Read All About It Here: http://www.universetoday.com/131702/...e-found-texas/

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9u_dzAizSjM

[Hervé]

NASA and FEMA rehearse for an asteroid strike on Los Angeles in 2020

Christopher Melenov The New york Times Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00 UTC

© JPL-Caltech/NASA An artist’s concept of a near-Earth object.

Imagine if scientists discovered that an asteroid was hurtling toward Los Angeles.

The possibility has existed on the pages of Hollywood scripts. But in what may be a case of life imitating art, NASA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government agencies engaged last month in a planetary protection exercise to consider the potentially devastating consequences of a 330-foot asteroid hitting the Earth.

The simulation projected a worst-case blast wave by an asteroid strike in 2020 that could level structures across 30 miles, require a mass evacuation of the Los Angeles area and cause tens of thousands of casualties.

In 1998, the movie "Armageddon" dramatized an even greater fictional threat. In that blockbuster, a ragtag crew was sent on a mission to drill into an asteroid and set off a nuclear bomb to avert a global catastrophe. As the character Harry Stamper, portrayed by Bruce Willis, summed up to his crewmates: "The United States government just asked us to save the world."

Don't expect the need for such Hollywood heroics in real life, however. An asteroid that could cause such damage has no significant chance of striking Earth within the next century, Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in an email.

The center relies on several telescopes, such as the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona, to track potentially hazardous asteroids and comets. These objects, which are leftover matter from the formation of planets, can come dangerously close to Earth or cross its trajectory.

The center lists 659 asteroids that have some probability of striking the planet, "but none pose a significant threat over the next century, either because the probabilities are extraordinarily small, or the asteroids themselves are extremely small," Mr. Chodas said.

© NASA

"Nevertheless, we must continue searching for asteroids in case there is one that is heading our way," he added.

© The Aerospace Corporation, via NASA Officials participated last month in an exercise that simulated an asteroid strike over Los Angeles.

That's where the planetary protection exercise, conducted on Oct. 25 in El Segundo, Calif., comes in. The simulation that projected a strike in 2020 involved representatives from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Department of Energy's National Laboratories, the Air Force and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services.

While a warning of four years may seem like a lot of time, it would probably not be enough to deflect an asteroid of the size and orbit outlined in the simulation, Mr. Chodas said.

"Engineers think the simplest way to deflect an asteroid is to build a large spacecraft and simply ram it into the asteroid" years before it is predicted to hit Earth, he said.

It could take up to two years to build such a "kinetic impactor" spacecraft and another year or more to reach the asteroid, so in the case of this simulation, an evacuation, not a "deflection mission," was necessary.

For the organizers of Asteroid Day, a global movement that seeks to protect the world from dangerous asteroids, such planning is not out of this world.

The group, which maintains that one million asteroids have the potential to strike Earth but that only 1 percent of them have been discovered, was set on Monday to release a letter signed by planetary scientists supporting missions to increase knowledge of asteroids. The group promotes the "100x Declaration," which calls for increasing the rate of asteroid discoveries to 100,000 per year in the next 10 years.

"The more we learn about asteroid impacts, the clearer it became that the human race has been living on borrowed time," Brian May, an astrophysicist and a founder and lead guitarist for the rock group Queen, said on the group's website.

Asteroid Day is observed each year on June 30, the anniversary of what is believed to be the largest space-related explosion in human history: an asteroid strike in Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908.

An asteroid, believed to be less than 100 feet in diameter, exploded at the altitude of an airliner and flattened tens of millions of trees across 800 square miles. Researchers estimated the explosion was as powerful as a medium-size hydrogen bomb and several hundred times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

While there were no official reports of human casualties, hundreds of reindeer were reduced to charred carcasses in the explosion, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported.

In more recent times, an asteroid exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013, shattering windows for miles and injuring more than 1,000 people.

Scientists have suggested that the Earth is vulnerable to many more Chelyabinsk-size space rocks. In research published in 2013 by the journal Nature, they estimated that such strikes could occur as often as every decade or two instead of an average of once every 100 to 200 years as previously thought.

Predictions of a catastrophic crash by a celestial object surface with some regularity. In September 2015, the last eclipse of the year fueled imaginative speculation on the internet that a giant asteroid would hit Earth.

In a statement debunking the idea, NASA noted that similar forecasts were made in January and March of that year that two asteroids were on dangerous paths toward Earth.

The agency noted that the asteroids flew by Earth "without incident — just as NASA said they would."

[Star Tsar]

Sott.net

Published 24th November 2016



Read all about it here: https://www.sott.net/article/334742-...t-by-meteorite

&

Fireball Observed Over Northern UK & Ireland

Galway, Ireland | 23rd November 2016 @ 17:15

Published 24th November 2016

Read all about it here: https://www.sott.net/article/334731-...nd-northern-UK

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BRT6bo0opEM

[Star Tsar]

Bright Meteor Reported Over Gulf Of Mexico Near Florida

Gulf Of Mexico | Monday 22nd November 2016 @ 23:18 EST

Published 22nd November 2016

@ 23:18 Monday there was a bright light that lit up the night over the Suncoast.

Read all about it here: http://www.mysuncoast.com/staff/fire...538e565a3.html

[Star Tsar]

Posted by Star Tsar (here)
Bright Meteor Reported Over Gulf Of Mexico Near Florida

Gulf Of Mexico | Monday 21st November 2016 @ 23:18 EST

Published 22nd November 2016

@ 23:18 Monday there was a bright light that lit up the night over the Suncoast.

Read all about it here: http://www.mysuncoast.com/staff/fire...538e565a3.html

More Footage Emerges

American Meteor Society

Event #4635-2016 | Gulf Of Mexico/Florida | 21st November 2016 @ 23:18 EST

Published 23rd November 2016

Supporting Link:http://www.amsmeteors.org/members/im...vent/2016/4635

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZDKtjtmo6tM

[Star Tsar]

Smithsonian Channel

Arizona's Jaw Dropping Mile Long Meteor Crater

Published 24th November 2016

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=odGrgsLkfUQ

[Star Tsar]

Sott.net

Published 24th November 2016



Read all about it here: https://www.sott.net/article/334742-...t-by-meteorite

&

Fireball Observed Over Northern UK & Ireland

Galway, Ireland | 23rd November 2016 @ 17:15

Published 24th November 2016

Read all about it here: https://www.sott.net/article/334731-...nd-northern-UK

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BRT6bo0opEM

[Star Tsar]

Thunderbolts Project

Space News | Water On Pure Metal Asteroid Baffles Scientists

Published 29th November 2016

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0MElgqjgJ5M

[Star Tsar]

Meteor? | Slupsk, Poland, 28th November 2016 @ 19:36 UTC

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BcPW2Zofjoo

&

Meteor | Denmark, 28th November 2016 @ 18:25 UTC

Related to above event

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-WEim8px3oM

[Star Tsar]

Astronomy Magazine

The Real Reality Show | Stones From The Sky : Collecting Meteorites

Published 23rd November 2016

Collecting meteorites lets you hold a space rock in your very own hands. Join Astronomy editor Dave Eicher to explore types of stone from space including rare pieces from the Moon & Mars.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UgMTR66DGto

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2FlUmALxg40

[Star Tsar]

Meteor | Sayanogorsk, Siberia, Russia | 6th December 2016 @ 18:35 GMT +7

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-H7_-ITd1GM

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=r0RDvwHIS5g

[Star Tsar]

NASA Goddard

OSIRIS-REx Tech | Taking Pictures Of An Asteroid

Published 7th December 2016

NASA is sending the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to explore near-Earth asteroid Bennu, a carbon-rich body that may contain clues to the origins of life. When OSIRIS-REx arrives at Bennu in 2018, it will spend over a year orbiting the asteroid and studying it with a set of remote sensing instruments. The OSIRIS-REx Camera Suite, or OCAMS, will provide high-resolution images of Bennu, allowing OSIRIS-REx to map the asteroid, determine its mineralogy, and even take close-up pictures of the surface at less than a centimeter per pixel. After OCAMS and its fellow instruments have thoroughly surveyed Bennu, OSIRIS-REx will carry out its most important task: collecting a sample of the asteroid for return to Earth in 2023.

Read all about it here: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard...es-of-a-robot/

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QtIgmSa8F20