[meteorite-list] Astronomer Apologizes for Meteorite Fuss in Norway

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Jun 15 16:47:06 2006
Message-ID: <4dh3921lu195k1vp290mdgfqlqrfr3vvfl_at_4ax.com>

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 06:30:43 +1000, you wrote:

>How can a meteorite capable of creating a Hiroshima like impact almost
>completely burn up in the atmosphere and whose remnants hitting the Earth
>far too slowly be capable of creating a Hiroshima like impact.

I took it to mean that a meteorite with enough kinetic energy to cause a
Hiroshima-scale impact IF IT HIT WITHOUT PASSING THROUGH AN ATMOSPHERE FIRST
(sorry for screaming, no itallics in ascii) would still be small enough to burn
up completely in the Earth's atmosphere. As an example, look at the recently
recorded lunar hit, which is estimated to have been a 10 inch meteoroid and to
have made a crater 14 meters wide and 3 meters deep and to have had a yeild of
about 4 monotons of TNT. That sucker would never have reached the surface of
the Earth because all that energy would have been dumped into the atmosphere.
So I assume that he is saying that it may have had a Hiroshima-scale amount of
kinetic energy (10 kilotons or so) but all of that energy was dumped into the
atmosphere. (And to make a Hiroshima-scale impact on the ground would maybe
require something dumping a "Tsar Bomba" scale of energy into the atmosphere).
Received on Thu 15 Jun 2006 04:49:31 PM PDT