[meteorite-list] NASA Announces Spectacular Day of the Comet (Deep Impact)

From: MexicoDoug_at_aol.com <MexicoDoug_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Jun 9 16:29:14 2005
Message-ID: <210.2823a71.2fda008b_at_aol.com>

Ron B. kindly forwarded:

>"In the world of science, this is the astronomical equivalent
>of a 767 airliner running into a mosquito," said Don Yeomans,
>a Deep Impact mission scientist at JPL.

Sneaky NASA and Don, doing those back of the envelope orbital calculations
on the fly, ignoring the energy and momentum of the mosquito when discussing
the risk of orbital modification / earthward accidents. Better to speak
truthfully when there is no need not to...It has the energy of shooting a 767 with
the most powerful airgun with the heaviest pellet, permitted under British
Law at the cockpit, of course. British airguns are permitted much more
powerful than their European counterparts.

By the logic used, and the examples made, one loses the idea with familiar
mosquitos, in my opinion. The comet's mass is about 5.4 X 10^10 metric tons.
That's 54,000,000,000 tons or 54 (USA small) billion metric tons. A mosquit
o is 2.5 mg. A half fueled 767 with cargo is about 115 metric tons. But
the whole point of it is the energy of impact and the speed. A mosquito is the
wrong choice to illustrate this.

Thus, the 767 is 46 billion times times more massive than the mosquito after
dinner, and the comet is 146 billion times more massive than the 0.37 metric
ton impactor.

So amusingly it is more in the range of a mosquito hitting a 747 in the
cockpit though the mosquito would have the relative energy and hardness of a
bullet, and the energy of 20 billion Joules (=4.7 million food calories or in
common terms, that contained in the fat of 16,000 Big Macs burned completely at
100% efficiency). The fat in a single Big Mac can power threehundred-sixty
458 Magnum bullets at MUZZLE velocity, each of which could easily penetrate
through three persons before stopping.

Now those mosquitos and Big Macs can be deadly,but what about those half ton
copper hammers?????

Saludos, Doug
 
OK if you want to use momentum, go ahead, ...
 
Received on Thu 09 Jun 2005 04:28:59 PM PDT