OT: "it's a bird... it's a plane..." BOOM!

It is a Toyota truck commercial.

--

    Boris Mohar

Fake.

Basically, because if it was real, it'd be news. The explosion at the end is far too 'fuel rich', and any meteors with great amount of burnable content will be fragile enough that they'll burn up rapidly way before hitting the earth.

A meteor has hit a truck. IIRC, a small hole resulted. There have been no recorded fatalities due to them.

[snip] [snip]

Not necessarily so. A fairly large meteorite passed overhead here one night at maybe 1000' above the ground... path virtually parallel to the ground.

Scared the crap out of me... huge... lit up the place like daylight. Hit the ground somewhere south of here on the Gila River Indian Community.

They still haven't found the impact point, though it was sighted by thousands of people.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

A Hilux ? LOL ! The guys at Top Gear will love that. They've been trying to destroy one for ages.

Graham

Even something pokey like a V-2 or a Scud packs more destruction in its kinetic energy than in its explosive warhead. A meteor, going some tens of kilometers per second, is explosive no matter what it's made of.

This is interesting...

John

They did a great job, IMO.

Thanks for the lead.

Despite the astro.sfasu.edu address, I should advise the peanut gallery that this can't possibly be real. Meteors are a lot faster than that. Notoriously, you never get to tell anyone about a meteor before it's over. (I'm referring, of course, to meteors that don't hit the ground. I've never seen one hit the ground.)

Ah! Thanks for tracking it down so quickly.

Yes, it is. However. If something going at 10Km/s had touched down, you do not get something that looks very like someone exploding a cannister of gasoline. The bright flash, and loud explosion as the entire kinetic energy gets released in a small fraction of a millisecond is noticably missing. There is no supersonic shock wave. Annoyingly, the mpeg artifacts make analysis a bit harder.

Something that the conspiracy mongers also failed to consider re: the attack on the Pentagon.

Graham

The V2 had a warhead with 730 kg of "high explosive" - which I would presume to have 4-5 kilojoules per gram or 2.9-3.7 gigajoules of explosive yield.

The V2 had a top speed of 1.585 km/sec and a total mass after exhausting its fuel being 4173 kg, for kinetic energy of 5.24 gigajoules - assuming it impacts at this speed rather than being slowed by the lower atmosphere.

However, at actual V2 impact speeds, the kinetic energy has destructive value so low that it is considered that the V2 would have been more destructive if its warhead had a proximity fuze so that it detonated before getting buried. Apparently, kinetic energy at these speeds mostly becomes heat short of formation of explosively expanding vapors.

How true! A gram of TNT at Earth escape velocity of roughly 40 km/sec has 4.67-4.85 kilojoules of explosive chemical energy and 800 kilojoules of kinetic energy if I did not screw this up. Once the kinetic energy is enough turn the impacting object and nearby portions of what it hit into a mass of high pressure vapor, the kinetic impact becomes explosive yield.

The Wikipedia article on the "megaton" has measurements of TNT being

1.12 kilocalories per gram (4.67 kilojoules per gram) and theoretical figure for chemical energy being 1.16 kcal/gram (4.85 kilojoules per gram). Although in arms control treaties, a gram of TNT is officially 1 kcal or 4.184 kilojoules per gram.

Whoa - very interesting! Mentions some impressive impacts by meteorites, 2 actually destructive airbursts (one is the Tunguska one) and a smaller harmless airburst of 11 kilotons in 1992!

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Knowing that it was going faster than the speed of sound would have given me another clue, there would be no sound until impact.

Sorry for the interruption. As usual, you all were the first to jump in and discuss the subject even though the last group I posted to.

Have fun.

If it passed over your head, "virtually" parallel to thr ground, then landed south of you, it was no meteor! (you're currently moving east at approx. 866 MPH, at 30 degrees north) ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Err, no. The vast majority of meteors are not inclined significantly to the earths orbital plane. This does not mean that none are.

Well, actually, Jim didn't say which direction it was going when it streaked over the house; I just ass-u-me-d it'd be going east-to-west; I guess Earth's rotation wouldn't be that big a factor when you talk about orbital speeds and times in seconds. :-)

But, yeah, there's no physical reason a meteor _couldn't_ come from north of the solar system somewhere. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Obviously God sent that your way to help you poop.

er, um, judging from the length of time the meteor is visible, it can't be doing any more than 200MPH or so. It's mighty unlikely a meteor would hit the Earth at that speed. Just too unlikely. A few kilo-MPH up to 25KMPH escape velocity is more like it.

Exactly. As an amateur astronomer, I know very well that a meteor is over with before you can talk about it, usually before you can make any noise at all to alert others.

Damned insightful to see through that low budget production...