Skywatch

[Palehorse]

The one we apparently did NOT see exploded over Russia this morning injuring 1,000 people (est) and damaging buildings and structures. . . 

There is amateur video of it at the link below.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/15/world/europe/russia-meteor-shower/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

[Palehorse]

Yep!  We should be constantly reminded that the solar system is a shooting gallery.

Moscow (CNN) -- A meteor streaked through the skies above Russia's Urals region Friday morning, before exploding with a flash and boom that shattered glass in buildings and left about 1,000 people hurt, state media said.

The number of injured has continued to rise through the day as new reports come in from across a swath of central Russia.

As of late afternoon local time, the Interior Ministry said about 1,000 people had been hurt, including more than 200 children, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency said.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/15/world/europe/russia-meteor-shower/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

Sorry for the redundancy. . . I did not see you had already posted about this.

[Locutus]

Uh, I think that is something I would be just fine if I was NOT reminded of.  First of all, there isn't diddly squat you or I can do about it.  So, If it is going to happen, it's going to happen.  Thinking about it happening is not something I want waste too much time on. 

I guess, if they knew for a fact it was going to hit somewhere in central Indiana at a certain time.........THEN, it might be a good time to go visit my good buddy Locutus in sunny Florida.   

Any time is a good time to visit your buddy Locutus in South Florida. 

[Henry Hawk]

Any time is a good time to visit your buddy Locutus in South Florida. 

Hey, you don't have to wait until an astroid nails South Florida either to visit your hoosier buddies!   

[Henry Hawk]

I took this picture with my phone just a few minutes ago...

[Locutus]

Someone in Russia captured this image this morning.   

[followsthewolf]

He looks like he's enjoying that just a little too much.

[Locutus]

He looks like he's enjoying that just a little too much.

[Locutus]

Here's what really happened.  This is one of the best videos I've seen.

http://www.youtube.com/v/sl_RknL9G-Q

[Locutus]

And from inside an office in the second part of this video:

http://www.youtube.com/v/1kvHl5Qcnzc

[libby]

Don't forget we have an extremely close asteroid approach tomorrow.  Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson offered the following humorous graphic to shed a bit of truth on this very close encounter.

I wonder... is precognition one of Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson's gifts?

Here's an update from today's Washington Post.

As asteroid whizzes by, surprise meteor makes an impact over Russia

By Brian Vastag, Will Englund and Joel Achenbach, Published: February 15, 2013

It was a day when the Earth was caught in a cosmic crossfire. The big rock came from the south, the smaller one from the east. They were unrelated objects, with different orbits, one the size of an apartment building, the other slimmer but with better aim.

The larger asteroid missed by 17,000 miles, as expected, but the Russian meteor stole the show Friday, fireballing across the Ural Mountains in spectacular fashion and exploding into fragments, creating a powerful shock wave that blew out windows, collapsed roofs and injured 1,200 people, mostly from broken glass.

It was surely the most thoroughly documented meteor in human history — captured by countless crack-of-dawn Russian drivers who own dashboard cameras.

The spectacle capped an extraordinary day for the planet. The object, which exploded over the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, caused the largest such impact in more than a century and was the first to inflict significant human casualties, with at least 48 victims hospitalized.

The asteroid that was supposed to show up Friday, the much-hyped 2012 DA14, passed by harmlessly, just as the experts had promised it would.

But they had no way of seeing the other rock heading toward Russia. The explanation from NASA scientists, when asked why they hadn't spotted it, boiled down to two simple facts: It was small, and the sun was in their eyes.

"This was the largest object observed to hit the Earth since 1908," said Margaret Campbell-Brown, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario. That's when another space rock exploded over Siberia, leveling 800 square miles of forest in what became known as the Tunguska event.

On Friday, a global network of sensors recorded the space rock's object's descent and revealed its stunning power. It measured about 50feet wide, weighed more than a nuclear-powered submarine and screamed in at 40,000 miles per hour, said Campbell-Brown, who examined data from sonic sensors deployed by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization to detect nuclear detonations.

In its 30-second shallow-angle dive into the thickening atmosphere, the meteor shed energy equivalent to more than 20 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs. Most of that energy was dissipated many miles above the surface, and, in a sense, the atmosphere saved the day, preventing catastrophic damage from a major surface impact.

Initial estimates from Russian authorities sketched a much smaller and weaker object, but scientists say the nuclear-sensor network provides the best measure an incoming asteroid's size and power.

Intense heat and pressure shattered the object into dozens of large pieces during its descent. Russian officials said they believed they had identified meteorite fragments on the ground 50 miles west of Chelyabinsk and had reports of pieces stretched out over another 75 miles.

Searchers also found a circular hole in the ice, 15 to 20 feet across, in a lake west of Chelyabinsk, and roped it off.

A transcript from a meeting of Russian emergency officials indicated about 3,000 buildings suffered damage.

The region's governor, Mikhail Yurevich, said the biggest worry after the incident was the cold, with single-digit temperatures forecast overnight. "Our main task now is to preserve the heat in offices and homes where windows were shattered, to prevent the heating system from freezing," he said.

Chelyabinsk, a city of 1.1 million people, has a high concentration of defense industries, and arsenals in its vicinity have occasionally exploded, but the meteor's arrival appears not to have set off any. The roof of a zinc factory, however, came crashing down, triggering a spike in global zinc prices.

Russian President Vladi­mir Putin said, "Thank God no large objects fell in populated areas. However, there were still people who were injured." The Interior Ministry, meanwhile, mobilized 10,000 police to deal with the incident.

The event immediately generated conspiracy theories. Oneanti-Western member of Russia's parliament, Vladimir Zhirinov­sky, claimed that the meteor was actually a U.S. weapons test.

Scientists say the object was instead a small asteroid. NASA's Bill Cooke said it flew in from the asteroid belt, a band of space rocks circling the sun beyond Mars and the source of all near-Earth asteroids.

History has recorded occasional injuries from meteorites, but the number hurt Friday is unprecedented, said Timothy McCoy, who studies meteorites at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. "I can't think of a burst this size over a city before," he said.

Amateur footage showed at least two orange flashes as the meteor streaked over apartment buildings. A series of booms trailed the space rock. As it exploded, the meteor briefly blazed brighter than the sun.
And no one saw it coming.

A weather satellite's camera snapped the meteor's dive, but a global network of asteroid-spotting telescopes funded by NASA failed to detect it. The sun was in the way, the telescopes blinded by a dayside approach.

"An asteroid such as this is virtually impossible to see ahead of time," said Paul Chodas of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The twin asteroid encounters on Friday — one benign, the other malign — laid bare both the uncertain reality of life in the cosmos — you never know when a space rock might come crashing down — and our planet's lack of defense against such threats.

NASA, the world's lead agency for detecting asteroid hazards, boosted its budget for the task from $6 million in 2011 to $21 million last year. And a NASA effort launched in 1998 has found 95 percent of potential "planet killers" at least a mile wide; none is headed for Earth. But still, many say the agency, and the world, are not doing enough.

Two congressmen seized the moment to promise hearings on the planet's space-threat readiness. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, said in a statement that developing technology to track asteroids "is critical to our future," while Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) called asteroid impacts the "only true preventable natural disaster." Even if we find one that will hit us, he said, "we might not be able to deflect it."

A private effort by two former astronauts to build a space telescope to spot smaller Earth-bound asteroids has raised a few million dollars, but is years away from launch — if it ever gets off the ground.

Plans to deflect asteroids are even more nascent. Proposals range from the sublime — spraying an asteroid with reflective paint so the sun nudges it — to the extreme — nuking it. With early detection and a few decades of lead time, even a tiny nudge could push an asteroid out of the tiny "keyhole" in space that would otherwise send it crashing to Earth.

The European Space Agency and NASA are in the early stages of plotting a mission to smash a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if humans can, in fact, push around a sizeable space rock. The project, called AIM-DART, has no timeline and no real budget.

In another cosmic coincidence, three of the nation's top asteroid trackers met in Vienna on Friday with international counterparts under the auspices of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to better coordinate planetary defense.

"This is a what-sort-of-things-are-we-doing-to-protect-the-Earth meeting," said Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at Harvard University, the international clearinghouse for asteroid tracking. He said enthusiasm for building a better detection network runs high among the attendees from dozens of nations.
As for meeting on the day when the reality of extraterrestrial threats burst into view over Russia, Spahr said, "Yeah, pretty crazy timing."

Englund reported from Moscow. Caitlin Dewey and Olga Khazan in Washington contributed to this report.
© The Washington Post Company
   

[Palehorse]

SAN FRANCISCO — A science institute in Northern California says it has received numerous reports of a bright streak of light over the San Francisco Bay area.

The Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland reports receiving calls describing what appeared to be a fireball flying west Friday night, but it's not clear what the object was.

Astronomer Gerald McKeegan tells KGO-TV that the center's large telescopes did not pick up the object during a stargazing event.

The reports came hours after a meteor exploded over Russia and injured more than 1,000 people and an asteroid passed relatively close to Earth.

Experts say smaller meteorites hit Earth five to 10 times a year but large meteors such as the one in Russia are rarer. Another meteor landed in the Bay Area in October and caused a loud sonic boom.


Perhaps Dorner is now controlling space objects now that he is a ghost?

[Palehorse]

[Locutus]

South Florida meteor!! 

South Floridians who happened to be looking in the right place at the right time Sunday night saw one spectacular light show – possibly a sporadic meteor.

The Coast Guard began getting flooded with phone calls about 7:30 p.m., with reports of folks seeing flare-like objects from Jacksonville to Key West, according to Coast Guard Petty Officer 3rd Class Sabrina Laberdesque.

People called in, describing the flares "as orange or red fireballs in the sky," Laberdesque said. The display was limited to the sky: No injuries were reported, Laberdesque said.



http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/18/17001094-another-meteor-fireballs-light-up-florida-sky?lite

[Locutus]

For the record, I didn't see it. 

There is a video of the event on the link above.