[meteorite-list] Happy 15th, Peekskill

From: mckinney trammell <bigpineartifacts_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2007 10:35:12 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <401259.37447.qm_at_web53207.mail.re2.yahoo.com>

3 yrs. to legal, eh? i started _at_ 13.
--- Darren Garrison <cynapse at charter.net> wrote:

> Just 3 years till legal! Oh, wait...
>
>
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/web/20071009-peekskill-meteorite-astronomy-chevy-malibu.shtml
>
>
>
> Posted Tuesday October 9, 2007 07:00 AM EDT
>
>
>
> The Thing From Space That Destroyed the Car
> By John Steele Gordon
>
> Luckily for astronomers, it was a Friday night in
> the autumn. That meant that
> hundreds of thousands of people were at high school
> football games, many with
> camcorders at the ready to preserve any gridiron
> heroics. What they preserved as
> well, from at least 16 different locations from
> Kentucky to New York, was the
> path of a fireball across the sky as it streaked
> northeastward at better than
> ten miles a second. (See videos they shot here.) As
> earth?s atmosphere tightened
> its grip, the yard-wide meteor, which weighed
> several tons and shone brighter
> than the full moon, broke up into at least 70
> pieces. The only piece ever found
> weighed about 28 pounds. It announced its arrival on
> planet Earth by crashing
> through the back of a car parked in Peekskill, New
> York, on the night of October
> 9, 1992, 15 years ago today.
>
> The owner of the car, a red 1980 Chevy Malibu, was
> 17-year-old Michelle Knapp.
> She went outside with a friend to investigate the
> noise, and when they saw the
> damage to the car, they looked beneath it and
> discovered the meteorite, nestled
> in a small crater it had made in the driveway. It
> was still warm from its
> passage through the atmosphere. Knapp called the
> police, who inspected the car
> and filed a report of criminal mischief. (Given the
> extensive damage to the car
> (see photos here), the criminal class in Peekskill
> must have been very
> well-armed indeed for mischief to have been a
> plausible explanation.) The
> persistent smell of gasoline from the ruptured fuel
> tank brought the fire
> department as well. Thanks to the many videos
> available, astronomers were able
> to calculate the angle at which the meteoroid had
> hit the earth?s atmosphere:
> 3.4 degrees. Had it been much shallower, it would
> have skimmed through the
> atmosphere and escaped back into space. (When in
> space, such an object is a
> meteoroid. When it enters the atmosphere and is
> incandescent, it becomes a
> meteor. If it explodes or disintegrates in the
> atmosphere, it is termed a
> fireball or bolide. After the pieces land, they are
> called meteorites.)
>
> Astronomers were even able to determine the path
> that the meteoroid had taken
> around the sun. For millions of years it had
> traveled as close as 80 million
> miles from the sun, inside the earth?s orbit, and
> had reached out as far as
> nearly 200 million miles, well beyond Mars. It had
> taken 1.8 earth years to
> complete an orbit.
>
> In the early days of the solar system, four billion
> and more years ago, the
> earth was frequently bombarded with meteorites, many
> of them huge. The moon was
> almost certainly formed by a collision between the
> proto-Earth and a Mars-size
> object at that time. Even today, in the sedate
> middle age of the solar system,
> earth?s considerable gravitational field sweeps up a
> lot of space junk as the
> planet orbits the sun. Every day the earth adds many
> tons to its mass this way.
> Most of it is in the form of dust, which simply
> slows up in the atmosphere
> without incandescing.
>
> But so-called ?shooting stars,? which are about the
> size of grains of sand, can
> be seen on any clear night by the dozens from any
> spot on earth, if you have the
> patience to wait for them. During meteor showers,
> such as the Perseids in August
> and the Leonids in November, when the earth passes
> through the debris left in
> the orbits of comets, they can often be seen at a
> rate of more than one a
> minute, all seeming to come from the same point in
> the sky, called the radiant.
> Very rarely, a meteor storm is encountered, and
> shooting stars can be seen by
> the thousands, such as on the night of November 12
> to 13, 1833, when at least a
> quarter of a million shooting stars were seen over
> North America.
>
> Much rarer, fortunately, are the larger hunks of
> space debris that are too big
> to be vaporized in the upper atmosphere. These
> meteor falls are still
> surprisingly common, however. One landed in a field
> in Yorkshire, England, in
> 1795 and narrowly missed a worker. It settled the
> long-standing argument about
> whether stones really do fall from the sky.
>
> In this country, a woman napping on her couch in her
> home in Sylacauga, Alabama,
> was struck by a meteorite on November 30, 1954, when
> it crashed through her
> roof, bounced off a radio, and hit her on the leg
> (see AmericanHeritage.com
> article here). Houses in Wethersfield, Connecticut,
> were struck by meteorites
> only 11 years apart, in 1971 and 1982.
>
> Larger meteors pose graver, but exponentially rarer,
> dangers. The meteor that
> produced the Barringer Crater in northern Arizona
> about 50,000 years ago was
> roughly 50 yards wide and released about 2.5
> megatons of energy to produce a
> crater nearly a mile wide and 570 feet deep. Such a
> meteor strikes the earth
> every thousand years or so.
>
> The ?Tunguska event,? in 1908, was probably a comet
> that did not strike the
> earth but rather exploded in the atmosphere over
> unpopulated Siberia, with a
> force equal to that of a hydrogen bomb. It flattened
> an estimated 80 million
> trees. Had its path through space been very slightly
> different, it might have
> exploded over densely populated Europe, with
> catastrophic consequences.
>
> A one-kilometer-wide meteor would cause globally
> devastating effects, but they
> hit only every half million years or so. A
> six-mile-wide meteor would end
> civilization and quite possibly annihilate the human
> race. One roughly that size
> is believed to have killed off the dinosaurs 65
> million years ago. There are now
> programs seeking to locate major asteroids and
> comets with earth-crossing orbits
> and develop ways of deflecting them, should they
> prove to be on a collision
> course.
>
> The meteorite that slammed into Michelle Knapp?s car
> had no such literally
> earthshaking consequences. Indeed, it proved a boon
> to Michelle Knapp. She told
> reporters that she had bought the 12-year-old car
> from her grandmother for only
> $100, and therefore the loss was small. But
> meteorites have a ready market,
> especially ones that achieve individual fame, often
> selling for thousands of
> dollars. (In fact, a fragment of the Peekskill
> meteorite, along with some video
> footage and pieces of the Malibu?s smashed
> taillight, will be sold at auction
> later this month, with an estimated price of $2,000
> to $3,000.) Knapp also sold
> the old clunker of a car, which later toured the
> world, for enough to buy a
> brand-new one.
>
> So modest-size meteorites are invited to hit my car
> if they?d like to. As long
> as I?m not in it at the time, of course.
>
> ?John Steele Gordon writes ?The Business of America?
> for American Heritage
> magazine. His most recent book is An Empire of
> Wealth: The Epic History of
> American Economic Power (HarperCollins).
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Received on Tue 09 Oct 2007 01:35:12 PM PDT