[meteorite-list] Fwd: FW: Glad it didn't hit here!

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-----Original Message-----
From: Terry N. Trees [mailto:TNTrees_at_bellatlantic.net]
Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2001 8:27 AM
To: AAAP ListServer; ORAS ListServer; Ray Montgomery; John Labrecque;
John Holtz; Jimmy Napolitano; Denny Sopchack; Denny Hill; Bob Yajko; Bob
Kepple; Josh Barto
Subject: [AAAP] FW: [astro-officers] FW: Glad it didn't hit here!


Sent by: "Terry N. Trees" <TNTrees_at_BellAtlantic.net>



Something to consider before you go to bed tonight . . . -- joe rao

MILITARY WARNING SYSTEM TRACKED BOMB-SIZE METEOROID

>From The New York Times, 29 May 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/29/science/29ROCK.html

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

In the early darkness of April 23, as Washington was beginning to relax
after the spy plane crisis in China, alarm bells began to go off on the
military system that monitors the globe for nuclear blasts.

Orbiting satellites that keep watch for nuclear attack had detected a
blinding flash of light over the Pacific several hundred miles southwest of
Los Angeles. On the ground, shock waves were strong enough to register
halfway around the world.

Tension reignited until the Pentagon could reassure official Washington that
the flash was not a nuclear blast. It was a speeding meteoroid from outer
space that had crashed into the earth's atmosphere, where it exploded in an
intense fireball.

"There was a big flurry of activity," recalled Dr. Douglas O. ReVelle, a
federal scientist who helps run the military detectors. "Events like this
don't happen all the time."

Preliminary estimates, Dr. ReVelle said, are that the cosmic intruder was
the third largest since the Pentagon began making global satellite
observations a quarter century ago. Its explosion in the atmosphere had
nearly the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The episode shows how the system that warns of missile attack and
clandestine nuclear blasts is fast evolving to detect bomb-size meteors as
well. Now, it finds them about once a month, on average. But Dr. ReVelle, a
scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said in an
interview that the developing system was likely to find many more of the
natural blasts in the years ahead.

"The real number is probably bigger," he said. "There's no doubt about that.
But we don't know how much bigger."

Already, the system has shown that the planet is being continually struck by
large speeding rocks, and that the rate of bombardment is higher than
previously thought. The blasts light the sky with brilliant fireballs but
people seldom see the blasts because they usually occur over the sea or
uninhabited lands.

The rocky objects are anywhere from a few feet to about 80 feet wide. They
vanish in titanic explosions high in the atmosphere, their enormous energy
of motion converted almost instantly into vast amounts of heat and light.

The Air Force did not publicly disclose its imaging of the recent blast
until late May, more than a month afterward. In a terse release on May 25,
its Technical Applications Center, at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida,
said the flash was "non- nuclear" and consistent with past observed meteor
explosions.

A Defense Department satellite, the Air Force said, detected bright flashes
over a period of more than two seconds.

After that disclosure, Los Alamos got the military's permission to reveal
its own detection of the April event. Its ground-based sensors are even more
sensitive than orbiting satellites to the repercussions of meteor blasts.
The ground-based sensors work like sensitive ears to detect very
low-frequency sound waves, which radiate outward from an exploding rock over
hundreds and thousands of miles.

The sensors record sounds well below the range of human hearing, including
those from underground nuclear tests as well as atmospheric blasts.

Dr. ReVelle said four arrays of the lab's sound sensors had picked up the
April blast. In addition, he said, sound detectors in Los Angeles, Hawaii,
Alaska, Canada and Germany had picked up its shock waves. Two sensors in
South America made tentative detections, he added.

"It was a big event," he said. "There are people worrying about impacts on
the earth, and these things are giving us a better understanding of the
impact rate. That's the real byproduct scientifically."

The speeding boulder was perhaps 12 feet wide, he added.

An even more sensitive global ear is emerging as the world's nations try to
monitor the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a tentative accord that seeks to
end the exploding of nuclear arms and to police compliance. When finished in
the next year or so, the global acoustic system is to consist of 60 arrays
that give complete global coverage, increasing the odds that even more large
meteor impacts will be detected.

The disclosure of such intruders is seen as bolstering the idea that the
earth is periodically subjected to strikes by even larger objects, including
doomsday rocks a few miles wide. Objects this size are predicted to hit once
every 10 million years or so, causing mayhem and death on a planetary scale.

Copyright 2001, The New York Times

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