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http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish … 032005]New theory
*Checked with "Search" to make sure a thread for this meteor hadn't already been started previously. I can't find one.
Scientists have been wondering where the impact-melted rock is. They now figure the meteor was traveling slower than previously presumed/estimated, and also that it broke apart while still descending: The bottom half fell in chunks and the other half slammed intact last.
Estimate the meteor was 130 ft in diameter and weighed 300,000 tons.
That velocity is almost four times faster than NASA's experimental X-43A scramjet -- the fastest aircraft flown -- and ten times faster than a bullet fired from the highest-velocity rifle, a 0.220 Swift cartridge rifle.
But it's too slow to have melted much of the white Coconino formation in northern Arizona, solving a mystery that's stumped researchers for years.
Interesting and detailed information about our atmosphere -- the pressure of it is like "hitting a wall." Even iron meteorites...
At about 3 miles (5 km) altitude, most of the mass of the meteorite was spread in a pancake shaped debris cloud roughly 650 feet (200 meters) across.
The fragments released a total 6.5 megatons of energy between 9 miles (15 km) altitude and the surface, Melosh said, most of it in an airblast near the surface, much like the tree-flattening airblast created by a meteorite at Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908.
The intact half of the Meteor Crater meteorite exploded with at least 2.5 megatons of energy on impact, or the equivalent of 2.5 tons of TNT.
Yipes. :-\
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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