http://news.yahoo.com/possible-meteor-shower-reported-eastern-russia-052833588.html
Different chunk of space rock.
Here's a video of the meteor:
http://youtu.be/k2BYqLpHKT0
Definitely not the whole 'roid anyhow, but the timing of this is hard to ignore. A fragment from the same asteroid though?
It'll be interesting if tomorrow we find out that instead of one asteroid, there's a bunch of smaller objects traveling along that orbit. Earth's gravity might have fractured it.
Another vid. http://news.yahoo.com/video/russian-meteorite-caught-tape-injuries-071827265.html
Bad Astronomy blog on the event from Slate (//http://). While the fireball was impressive the sonic boom when it finally reached the ground was tremendous. It contains lots of links and embedded videos.
And it's unlikely related. The asteroid that's passing is on a south to north trajectory. This, based on where the sun was it looked to be going east to west.
You know, I begin to suspect people won't even care until one of these close-passers takes out their cell's satellite or makes their tv channels go away. :roll:
Also, I wonder about the timinng of last weeks further evidence that the crater in the Gulf of Mexico was the dinosaur killer.
Quote from: blackjak on February 15, 2013, 12:27:12 PM
You know, I begin to suspect people won't even care until one of these close-passers takes out their cell's satellite or makes their tv channels go away. :roll:
Also, I wonder about the timinng of last weeks further evidence that the crater in the Gulf of Mexico was the dinosaur killer.
Of course.
Near destruction of the earth? meh who cares.
Extinction? Boring
Potnetial destruction of entire cities? *yawn*
Astroid takes out Real Housewives of Atlanta?- ZOFG!!! WHHHHHYYYYY!!! This is cruelty!
Aaron Williams has a poster for that.
(https://images.weserv.nl/?url=descrier.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F07%2Fasteroids-428x523.jpg)
The one in Russia was likely the size of an office desk.
Now this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gQ6Pa5Pv_io) is an interesting video of someone just parking somewhere (once he cleared a parking space) and leaving his car alone. His dash cam (does everyone have a dash cam in Russia? a way to document traffic accidents?) gets interesting at around 4:30 but it takes until 7:00 till the boom (booms) come.
Quote from: FatherXmas on February 15, 2013, 04:39:35 PM
(does everyone have a dash cam in Russia? a way to document traffic accidents?)
According to a comment I read, that's the reason why. Apparently there's also a tax incentive or something.
Quote from: FlyingCarcass on February 15, 2013, 05:31:24 PMAccording to a comment I read, that's the reason why. Apparently there's also a tax incentive or something.
I'm sure the idea of recording every single conversation that people have in their car is a convenient bonus too.
Amazing how strong the blast was, even at such a great distance. Assuming the blast came from the brightest flash, it was about 30 miles away from that parking lot.
Quote from: FatherXmas on February 15, 2013, 04:39:35 PM
Now this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gQ6Pa5Pv_io) is an interesting video of someone just parking somewhere (once he cleared a parking space) and leaving his car alone. His dash cam (does everyone have a dash cam in Russia? a way to document traffic accidents?) gets interesting at around 4:30 but it takes until 7:00 till the boom (booms) come.
I giggled when the car alarms went off. Further evidence of how powerful it was.
The one over Russia was the size of a motorhome, roughly. The Asteroid that passed between the GPS satellites and the weather and communication satellites was about the size of a ten story building. The Tongusca object was estimated to be about the size of an old VW Beetle. The Chicxulub object was the size of a medium sized town.
That said, Russia is a bit like Montana. It's vast, with localized pockets of population, except on the western quarter or so. If this had happened over a major metropolis, we wouldn't be having casual discussions; we would be sending aid.
The Russian meteor and 2012 DA14 are in no way related courtesy of http://www.spaceweather.com/ and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-061 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-062
The other bit of good news 2012 DA14 missed the satellites on orbit which is very good news for all of those that rely on them for navigation, weather and even the reality*shudder* programmes.
Not mentioning the other functions that they are useful for *ahem* information gathering *ahem*
The Batallion's opening shots. Where, I say, where are the Shivans?
Heard somewhere that the dashcams are the publics only recourse in corrupt courts.
Quote from: FatherXmas on February 15, 2013, 04:39:35 PMdoes everyone have a dash cam in Russia?
From what I've read, there is apparently rampant insurance fraud (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kjj-1L6qeOc) in Russia. Commercial vehicles, in particular, are required to have dash cams. And I guess, the general populous have been getting them too. As a side effect, that's why there are so many crash videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8GLcSmlXm0) available from Russia.
I have been inspired to shop for a dash cam. Unfortunately, the ones at Amazon all have such poor reviews.
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fzyalt.livejournal.com%2F722930.html&act=url (http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fzyalt.livejournal.com%2F722930.html&act=url)
http://www.heavy.com/news/2013/02/meteorite-like-object-strikes-cuba-as-asteroid-buzzes-earth-after-russia-meteorite-strike/ (http://www.heavy.com/news/2013/02/meteorite-like-object-strikes-cuba-as-asteroid-buzzes-earth-after-russia-meteorite-strike/)
What will strike us is the utter lack of reaction from the Russian drivers. Keep in mind that until the late 1980s, expressing emotion to the wrong people could result in you taking a long unplanned vacation to a labor camp. Or worse. So culturally there is that happening. I mean I'm sure that this is being discussed, and so on, but in a different way. IIRC in Russia you would be in private with your confidantes, versus looking for the nearest TV camera for your 15 mins of fame on reality TV
If that makes sense. Over there for a longest time, attracting attention to yourself could be a lethally bad career choice
Versus here where it's a path to 'fame' in a sense. The saying about the nail that sticks up gets hammered down is a very real thing there, versus over here.
Still I get a kick out of the guy with the cam in the parking lot of what is obviously an industrial building when the shockwave hits. Clearly going "WHAT THE FRAK WAS THAT?" as all the car alarms go off.
Quote from: Victoria Victrix on February 16, 2013, 03:08:33 AMIf that makes sense. Over there for a longest time, attracting attention to yourself could be a lethally bad career choice Versus here where it's a path to 'fame' in a sense. The saying about the nail that sticks up gets hammered down is a very real thing there, versus over here.
Adding even more to the fear behind all of this: It wasn't very long ago, less than a decade by some accounts, that Russia was still running on its hair-trigger policy for nuclear defense. North Korea just shook their sabre at the world recently, and then suddenly there's this object shooting through the sky that ends with a blinding flash and an earth-shattering kaboom. I'm sure the cold war is still fresh in Russia's memory, and some argue it never even ended. Just imagine what was probably going through everyone's mind.
Quote from: JaguarX on February 15, 2013, 03:05:12 PM
Of course.
Near destruction of the earth? meh who cares.
Extinction? Boring
Potnetial destruction of entire cities? *yawn*
Astroid takes out Real Housewives of Atlanta?- ZOFG!!! WHHHHHYYYYY!!! This is cruelty!
Is it at all shocking that taking away the escapes we use to cope with the fact that we are always teetering on the edge of unpreventable disasters of varying magnitudes is of more immediate importance than the distant threat or realisation of such disasters? We need to be distracted from the Total Perspective Vortices that naturally present themselves lest our psyches collapse in upon themselves.
Quote from: Aggelakis on February 15, 2013, 08:08:15 PM
I giggled when the car alarms went off. Further evidence of how powerful it was.
What impressed me was the shaking of the car from the primary and followup sonic booms. Based on the time delay between the meteor passing and the sonic boom it was that "loud" roughly 25-30 miles away.
Quote from: eabrace on February 15, 2013, 03:27:11 PM
Aaron Williams has a poster for that.
(https://images.weserv.nl/?url=descrier.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F07%2Fasteroids-428x523.jpg)
Incidentally... shouldn't that be "Meteors"? They're not really saying anything until they enter your atmosphere...
NASA (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-061) now estimates it was 17m in size weighing around 10,000 tons and was equivalent to nearly 1/2 megaton of energy released.
Yeah. I used to live in Orlando and the booms made by a shuttle takeoff at Cape Canaveral were way smaller.
Let me apologize for not having read the whole thread (yet) but I just wanted you guys to know something and I'll try to be crystal clear:
We spaniards discovered the asteroid so... did you REALLY expect our calculations to be accurate?
Honestly, less worrying about the asteroid's name and more double checking calculations, we're spaniards after all so we're counting on someone to double chack calculations and fix them because we already lost interest on it, discovering an asteroid might take a few weeks, but bragging about it lasts a lifetime :P
Quote from: Tenzhi on February 16, 2013, 07:17:27 AM
Is it at all shocking that taking away the escapes we use to cope with the fact that we are always teetering on the edge of unpreventable disasters of varying magnitudes is of more immediate importance than the distant threat or realisation of such disasters? We need to be distracted from the Total Perspective Vortices that naturally present themselves lest our psyches collapse in upon themselves.
hmmm I guess people need escape from the problems. *sigh* miss the days when people faced problems instead of trying to escape from them.
Wait, you dont need the nuts to do anything these days. All a person have to do is get online talk big and bad to show how tough they are and they are immediate bad panacake. :p
Watching the coverage of 2012 DA14 passing I'm reminded how much I miss Miles O'Brien or Lou Dobbs on CNN (both really big space geeks). They would have at least told people what the name 2012 DA14 means which could be used to illustrate just how many of these things are found every year. CNN resorted to putting their weatherman on to explain a bit about the asteroid since CNN laid off all of their science and tech reporters back in 2008.
2012 - Year of discovery
D - Discovered 2nd half of February
A14 - Relative number discovered in that period. It starts with A, goes to Z (skips I because it could be confused with 1) then starts over at A1 - Z1, then A2 - Z2, etc.
So 2012 DA14 means it was the 351st asteroid discovered in the 2nd half of February 2012.
Oh, there's been 5 (or 6) asteroids that have based closer to Earth than 2012 DA14, those were very small and only discovered a few days before or after their pass.
And by (or 6) I mean asteroid 2008 TC3 which was discovered about 20 hour before it actually hit Earth above the Sudan in 2008. The first object whose impact area was calculated ahead of time.
I so wanna say NEERRRRDDSSS!! but then I'd be hypocritical about being a space geek, and this stuff hopefully will kick start the 'get the hell off this rock'-itis that needs to infect everyone. We're not exactly safe from something ELE sized, now, are we?
Wow, that blast though... scary. Cool, but scary.
/Salutin' mah fellow geeks! Space rocks!
//Oh, yeah, that pun wasn't supposed to happen. Crud. Leavin' it.
Quote from: houtex on February 16, 2013, 05:50:59 PM
I so wanna say NEERRRRDDSSS!! but then I'd be hypocritical about being a space geek, and this stuff hopefully will kick start the 'get the hell off this rock'-itis that needs to infect everyone. We're not exactly safe from something ELE sized, now, are we?
Wow, that blast though... scary. Cool, but scary.
/Salutin' mah fellow geeks! Space rocks!
//Oh, yeah, that pun wasn't supposed to happen. Crud. Leavin' it.
never been safe, cant do much about it. When it happens, it will happen. In the mean time I'm just enjoying the ride until last call. Although I'm kind of curious of what kind of creatures will spring up if an ELE did happen and wipes the planet clean of humans. Will they immediately start screaming about global warming because the glacier that is covering Florida after the cold that may come after the ELE is melting or will a couple meet and one of them say "the end is near".
Quote from: Tenzhi on February 16, 2013, 08:28:40 AM
Incidentally... shouldn't that be "Meteors"? They're not really saying anything until they enter your atmosphere...
I would much prefer that those asteroids that make us question how our space program is coming along remain asteroids so that we can still have these discussions. :)
Quote from: Tenzhi on February 16, 2013, 08:28:40 AMIncidentally... shouldn't that be "Meteors"? They're not really saying anything until they enter your atmosphere...
In space, nobody can hear you... uhh.... make rock noises?
Quote from: JaguarX on February 16, 2013, 06:01:29 PM
never been safe, cant do much about it. When it happens, it will happen. In the mean time I'm just enjoying the ride until last call. Although I'm kind of curious of what kind of creatures will spring up if an ELE did happen and wipes the planet clean of humans. Will they immediately start screaming about global warming because the glacier that is covering Florida after the cold that may come after the ELE is melting or will a couple meet and one of them say "the end is near".
Well, yeah, I know we've never been safe, Jag, just like the Dino's and Chixchilub (sp?)
But... we DO have an opportunity to NOT BE HERE, and that's what I'd like to see: Some o' us'n's not here, but out there. Thataway.
/I know, I know... pipe dream. Still like to see it.
Quote from: JaguarX on February 16, 2013, 03:46:56 PM
hmmm I guess people need escape from the problems. *sigh* miss the days when people faced problems instead of trying to escape from them.
Facing problems is something you do when there's a chance of overcoming and/or preventing them. When that's not an option you hide in a hole and hope the problem goes away, preferably leaving you in livable conditions afterwards even if you have to face the problem of picking up a few pieces.
Quote from: houtex on February 17, 2013, 03:50:41 AMBut... we DO have an opportunity to NOT BE HERE, and that's what I'd like to see: Some o' us'n's not here, but out there. Thataway.
/I know, I know... pipe dream. Still like to see it.
There's a Dutch space agency currently looking for volunteers for a future Mars colony.
(https://images.weserv.nl/?url=i.space.com%2Fimages%2Fi%2F000%2F026%2F299%2Fi02%2Frussia-huge-meteorite-bolide-130215c-02.jpg)
Quote from: TimtheEnchanter on February 17, 2013, 02:13:53 AM
In space, nobody can hear you... uhh.... make rock noises?
Yes, some people can... If they have radio to listen to a radio station that broadcasted rock... music :-)
Quote from: TimtheEnchanter on February 17, 2013, 05:46:50 AM
There's a Dutch space agency currently looking for volunteers for a future Mars colony.
Yeah, I read about that. Very very interesting concept, and I approve of it. And... frankly... sometimes I wonder if I should sign up. Doubt they'd take me, being short, somewhat overweight, 45 and having a teensy bit of pre-hypertension.
And that whole "where's my shower and toilet?" in the morning.. that might be tough to deal with...
But I applaud their efforts, and sincerely hope they get good people to volunteer their lives for the greater good of mankind. Because, waxin' poetic, that is nothing short of what it is, and it is a spectacular effort being thought about here.
Also, reading about this:
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Building_a_lunar_base_with_3D_printing
Makes it quite hopeful that this can be done really really easy with Mars too, maybe.
/Humans, sometimes, they don't suck so bad. :)
It seems like that particular chunk of rock was a "near miss" like George Carlin talks about (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuCN6CD8j_s (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuCN6CD8j_s)).
Now that I got that out of the way...
Quote from: TimtheEnchanter on February 17, 2013, 05:46:50 AM
There's a Dutch space agency currently looking for volunteers for a future Mars colony.
When I was a kid, I visited the Kennedy Space Center on a field trip. While there, I purchased a t-shirt that said "Space Available: I signed up for Mars!". I'm really tempted to order an adult-sized copy of that shirt and look into that Mars colony thing....
Quote from: FatherXmas on February 16, 2013, 08:02:47 AM
What impressed me was the shaking of the car from the primary and followup sonic booms. Based on the time delay between the meteor passing and the sonic boom it was that "loud" roughly 25-30 miles away.
The "boom" was not from a sonic boom, but from the rock literally exploding from the heat and pressure of entering the atmosphere. As mentioned above, the force was equivalent to a small thermonuclear device.
Quote from: JetFlash on February 18, 2013, 10:45:32 PM
The "boom" was not from a sonic boom, but from the rock literally exploding from the heat and pressure of entering the atmosphere. As mentioned above, the force was equivalent to a small thermonuclear device.
Otherwise known as a shockwave.
I think you can hear the double boom of the sonic boom (there is usually two) on one of the videos as well as the shockwave.
Quote from: JaguarX on February 16, 2013, 06:01:29 PM
never been safe, cant do much about it. When it happens, it will happen. In the mean time I'm just enjoying the ride until last call.
It's true we've always been "under the gun" of meteors coming along that could potentially wipe us out. The difference now is that we nearly have the technology to spread the human race beyond the confines of this one, single planet. It'd be cosmically ironic if we were to be wiped out now (after millions of years of evolution) just as we acquired the realistic means to save ourselves from an ELE. :'(
Sadly given the general apathy of most of the world's governments I suspect we'll have to eventually suffer some major city/region being wiped off the face of the Earth by some random meteor before everybody accepts the unavoidable need to have a serious space colonization program. Events like what happened in Russia the other day OUGHT to be enough to motivate the human race to get serious about going to space, but as we all know it'll soon be forgotten since it wasn't too disastrous - this time.
It's a simple question of economics: everyone knows it would cost billions (and then trillions) to establish colonies on the Moon or Mars so the governments of the world are willing to gamble between paying for a viable space program now versus waiting to see how much longer we can get away without having to pay for a meteor-based natural disaster. Basically being able to scientifically predict the chances it'll inevitably happen isn't going to be good enough for the narrow-minded, short-term thinking politicians - I suspect millions will have to die before we finally make it a united global priority to spend trillions to go to space.
The B612 Foundation is trying to raise money to put an infrared space telescope, Sentinel, into an orbit similar to Venus's looking out to spot asteroids coming from our blind side, toward the Sun. We detected asteroids today by looking for a moving object across multiple photos looking at the same patch of sky. Problem is we can only see them by the sunlight reflecting off of them so they have to be past our orbit for us to have any reasonable chance of seeing them. By putting a telescope closer to the sun, the idea is to spot asteroids as the exceed the orbit of Venus but within ours. By using an infrared telescope it eliminates the need that the asteroid reflects visible sunlight by allowing us to see it being warmed by the Sun.
As it is right now, we spot an uncomfortably high number of small asteroids days or hours before or after they pass us. This can be a somewhat disconcerting site for the general public, Earth's Busy Neighborhood (http://www.hohmanntransfer.com/). Note the number of up close asteroids that start with 2013 C or 2013 D were discovered this month and if they are on this site, are considered to be potentially hazardous Earth crossing ones.
Here's the official list (http://www.minorplanetcenter.org/iau/lists/Dangerous.html) of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids. Lastly this is a movie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_79355&feature=iv&src_vid=S_d-gs0WoUw&v=ONUSP23cmAE) showing the history of asteroid discovery from 1980 to 2011. You can easily spot when we started trying to find them all. Run it at the highest stream feed, the dots are rather small.
Quote from: FatherXmas on February 19, 2013, 08:16:07 PM
The B612 Foundation is trying to raise money to put an infrared space telescope, Sentinel, into an orbit similar to Venus's looking out to spot asteroids coming from our blind side, toward the Sun.
This Sentinel telescope sounds like a good idea and I hope something "high-profile" like that happens to generate interest. Perhaps if the general public starts becoming more aware about all the things that are actually flying around out there they'll take our overall need for activity in space a little more seriously.
Quote from: houtex on February 17, 2013, 05:58:06 PMYeah, I read about that. Very very interesting concept, and I approve of it. And... frankly... sometimes I wonder if I should sign up. Doubt they'd take me, being short, somewhat overweight, 45 and having a teensy bit of pre-hypertension.
And that whole "where's my shower and toilet?" in the morning.. that might be tough to deal with...
But I applaud their efforts, and sincerely hope they get good people to volunteer their lives for the greater good of mankind. Because, waxin' poetic, that is nothing short of what it is, and it is a spectacular effort being thought about here.
Also, reading about this:
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Building_a_lunar_base_with_3D_printing
Makes it quite hopeful that this can be done really really easy with Mars too, maybe.
/Humans, sometimes, they don't suck so bad. :)
When I heard about it, I thought that just a couple years prior I probably would've gone for it. These days... I'm married, and both my wife and I have health issues, and my once stone-cold attitude has been replaced with a great deal of anxiety over the years. Not a good combo for perpetually cramped quarters. Also, she and I, we're a lot of things. But breeders is not one of them. 8)
I've been wondering just how close we are to getting those 3D printers to be easily adaptable to utilize any kind of 'dust' material. The possibility of being able to build a base out of raw materials from anywhere is astounding.I still don't know how they expect to be able to fabricate the parts though. The size of the machines I've seen so far are way larger than the size of the items they can produce (maybe something 1/2 meter square). Unless they're planning on these structures being lego houses, I guess the printers are going to have to be very task-specific, so maybe something small can spit out I-beams, or whatever they have in mind for components.
And, heh, yes there's some good 'umies out there who care about furthering the "human adventure." But they're hard to find, as NASA points out here. ;) http://www.theonion.com/video/nasa-continues-search-for-planet-capable-of-suppor,30990/
(https://images.weserv.nl/?url=static.fjcdn.com%2Flarge%2Fpictures%2F43%2F04%2F4304d6_4437319.jpg)
Quote from: TimtheEnchanter on February 15, 2013, 09:53:24 AM
Definitely not the whole 'roid anyhow, but the timing of this is hard to ignore. A fragment from the same asteroid though?
It'll be interesting if tomorrow we find out that instead of one asteroid, there's a bunch of smaller objects traveling along that orbit. Earth's gravity might have fractured it.
Another vid. http://news.yahoo.com/video/russian-meteorite-caught-tape-injuries-071827265.html
I think you watch too many Hollywood movies. :P
Quote from: Mistress Urd on February 21, 2013, 06:55:39 PMI think you watch too many Hollywood movies. :P
I was thinking of Shoemaker Levy 9 :P which was once a single comet until it passed Jupiter and ended up looking like this. (https://images.weserv.nl/?url=static.ddmcdn.com%2Fgif%2Fcomet-shoemaker-levy9.jpg)
Which is probably exactly what they were thinking about when they decided to do the same thing in 'Armageddon.'
Edit: Come to think of it, I think the 'roid split up in 'Deep Impact' as well. But that might've been a direct result of an attempt to destroy it. Can't remember now. It's been too long.
Quote"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen...
2012 DA14 passed by the Earth roughly 16 hours after the Russian Meteor. In 16 hours the Earth moved roughly one million miles. One million miles to reach the point where DA14 crosses Earth's orbit from south to north (actually it never crossed the Earth's orbit, meaning the space the Earth occupies as is travels around the Sun, it just came REALLY close to it).
More importantly the path the meteor took over the planet was East to West with a slight North to South trajectory as well as coming from the directing of the rising sun, so it approached from the sun side of Earth's orbit where DA14 was coming in from the opposite side.
NASA
article (http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/Watch%20the%20Skies/posts/post_1361037562855.html) on their orbits.
Yeah, I accepted that after all the information was in. But still... I'd love to see someone draw up what the odds are of the closest pass of a large asteroid ever seen by man coinciding with the biggest meteor blast in over a century. Just... wow.
Quote from: TimtheEnchanter on February 21, 2013, 08:28:21 PM
I was thinking of Shoemaker Levy 9 :P which was once a single comet until it passed Jupiter and ended up looking like this. (https://images.weserv.nl/?url=static.ddmcdn.com%2Fgif%2Fcomet-shoemaker-levy9.jpg)
Which is probably exactly what they were thinking about when they decided to do the same thing in 'Armageddon.'
Edit: Come to think of it, I think the 'roid split up in 'Deep Impact' as well. But that might've been a direct result of an attempt to destroy it. Can't remember now. It's been too long.
It was also done in the movie "Meteor"
Quote from: TimtheEnchanter on February 21, 2013, 08:28:21 PM
I was thinking of Shoemaker Levy 9 :P which was once a single comet until it passed Jupiter and ended up looking like this. (https://images.weserv.nl/?url=static.ddmcdn.com%2Fgif%2Fcomet-shoemaker-levy9.jpg)
Which is probably exactly what they were thinking about when they decided to do the same thing in 'Armageddon.'
Edit: Come to think of it, I think the 'roid split up in 'Deep Impact' as well. But that might've been a direct result of an attempt to destroy it. Can't remember now. It's been too long.
Yes, it was. It was a comet though, 'Wolf-Biederman'. Part of the drama of the movie... lost a guy to an outgassing when the comet rotated out of 'night', and another guy got blinded by the sun due to not having his sheild down. They planted a nuke, blew it, and it made a chunk called 'Biederman'. That chunk, amazingly, was accelerated towards the earth, and was the size of Manhattan or something, and would impact the Earth several hours before 'Wolf' (the much bigger comet fragment left over) It would not cause an ELE, but it was definitely not going to be pretty. Wolf, though was still gonna cause an ELE.
Later in the movie, the Messiah was flown into a hole in the comet, nearer to it's heart (unlike the earlier nuke, which was a semi-near surface planting, but we're talking ice, so.. it should have made a slushy, but ice is really really hard in space) and the crew sacrificed the ship and themselves with a convenient second nuke they had on board, blowing up Wolf into so much crushed ice, mere hours, if not minutes, before impact. the remaning ice particles (and likely metals, sure) would individually slam into the atmosphere, but burn up and not make it to the ground... mostly.
And by far, the better of the two disaster asteroid/meteor/comet movies that year. Armageddon is the roughnecks in space silly movie, and with a meteor/asteroid. Oh sure, similarly fantastical (at this time), and much more over the top. Interesting note: It is likely that had not there been 'scout' meteors in both New York (lots of little ones) and Paris (a fairly big one) the monter one would not have been detected until it was amazingly late in the game. Please note that this is the likeliest scenario, no forewarning, much like the Russian meteor, we're not gonna know it's here until it's HERE
At least with a comet, you can see it coming a ways out, it can't help itself. Overall, Deep Impact was just so much more realistic in many ways, even if a bunch of hooey overall. :) I liked it better because it was 'more correct', in a sort of fashion.
/Seriously? You're gonna put a nuke in the middle of the thing THAT CLOSE to earth and expect the halves to fly by?
//Riiight... And that's not the only thing, but it's enough.
///Entertaining enough though, I still enjoyed it, just recognize it's hokey silly.
Quote from: houtex on February 22, 2013, 05:19:02 AM
Later in the movie, the Messiah was flown into a hole in the comet, nearer to it's heart (unlike the earlier nuke, which was a semi-near surface planting, but we're talking ice, so.. it should have made a slushy, but ice is really really hard in space) and the crew sacrificed the ship and themselves with a convenient second nuke they had on board, blowing up Wolf into so much crushed ice, mere hours, if not minutes, before impact. the remaning ice particles (and likely metals, sure) would individually slam into the atmosphere, but burn up and not make it to the ground... mostly.
"Well, look on the bright side. We'll all have high schools named after us. "
Actually they had quite a few bombs, not counting the ones they used for propulsion (it was a nuclear orion design). They ran out of time and the ship was damaged before they could plant them all. It's just one of the aspects of that film that kept the science within throwing distance of reality.
The vast majority of nuclear weapons are well under the 1 megaton yield. The biggest nuke the US ever set off was 15 MT and that yield was accidental while the USSR set off one 58 MT weapon just to say "see, mine's bigger than yours".
Aye, I thought Deep Impact was the better, more realistic film as well. Forget the majority picking up on that though. I've seen a lot of films that do a lot of unrealistic crap in them, but Armageddon actually made Star Wars space physics look good. The "shuttles docking with a spinning space station" scene is downright cringe-worthy. Sex with animal crackers just has more appeal I guess.
On the brighter side of things, we only have to endure 10 more years of narrowly-dodging deadly space objects until we get to find out what happens to an asteroid when we hit it with a chunk of metal.
http://news.yahoo.com/asteroid-smashing-mission-picks-space-rock-target-053602953.html
I guess it's a good thing 2/3 of the earth is water, or we would be hearing about these events more often.