[meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2007 18:23:35 -0500
Message-ID: <149a01c80acb$6b158370$b92ee146_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi, Jan, List,

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5isWWHSxCh_u0yUNU9Gpk1qfg996A
    "...More details emerged when astrophysicist Jose Ishitsuka of
Peru's Geophysics Institute reached the site about 6 miles from
Lake Titicaca. He confirmed that a meteorite caused a crater
42 feet wide and 15 feet deep, the institute's president, Ronald
Woodman, told The Associated Press on Thursday.
    Ishitsuka recovered a 3-inch magnetic fragment and said it
contained iron, a mineral found in all rocks from space. The
impact also registered a magnitude-1.5 tremor on the institute's
seismic equipment - that's as much as an explosion of 4.9
tons of dynamite, Woodman said.
    Local residents described a fiery ball falling from the sky
and smashing into the desolate Andean plain..."

    The IGP has been quoted in the Peruvian press as essentially
making the claim that they, rather than INGEMMET, should be
in charge of the meteorite, its recovery and preservation.

    It is possible to interpret the term "a fiery ball falling from
the sky" as meaning that the object was in ablative flight all
the way to the ground (has been observed elsewhere, so not
impossible). That would mean an impact velocity equal to
or greater than 2000 meters/second.

   5 TNT tons energy = 21,000,000,000 joules. At 2000 m/s,
it would require a 10,500 kilo (10.5 ton) impactor. Some might
say that's unlikely. A one TNT ton impact at 2000 m/s would
need only a 2 ton impactor, and so on

You can fiddle with these figures yourself.
Here's the kinetic energy calculator:
http://www.csgnetwork.com/kineticenergycalc.html
and the Megaton (TNT) joules converter:
http://www.unitconversion.org/energy/joules-to-megatons-conversion.html
Or, one gram of TNT = 4184 Joules.[
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaton

    Crash a few bolides!


Sterling K. Webb
----------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan Hattenbach" <jan.hattenbach at web.de>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 5:20 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL


> The Peruvian
> seismic measurement was 5 tons TNT.

This may sound odd, but where is that number from? I was talking to a
geologist of the University of Arequipa, and he told me that they did record
nothing at the time of the event.

Regards,

jan

> -----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: "Sterling K. Webb" <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net>
> Gesendet: 10.10.07 00:02:42
> An: "K. Ohtsuka" <ohtsuka at jb3.so-net.ne.jp>
> CC: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> Betreff: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event
> ADDITIONAL


>
> Hi,
>
> After reading through those other documents
> on the Major University of San Andres website
> and concluding that they contained nothing we
> didn't already know, I realized I hadn't read the
> footnotes in the one article that had footnotes,
> and indeed I found one new piece of information
> in those footnotes: one local inhabitant of Carancas,
> Don Gregorio Iruri, was standing only 300 meters
> from the point of impact at the time of the impact.
>
> That's all, a one-sentence footnote. It astounds
> me that an "investigator," scientific or otherwise,
> had located an eye-witness to as rare an event as
> a cosmic impact but did not ask questions nor collect
> his story! What did it look like? What did it sound
> like? Was there a flash of light? How bright was it?
> How strong was the shock wave? How strong was
> the wind from the blast? Was he knocked down?
> Rolled over? Or did he stay on his feet? Was he
> deafened, even slightly? And about 1000 other
> questions...
>
> The closest living witness to a cosmic impact
> among the planet's 6.6 billion people and no one
> asked him to describe it? Makes me wonder how
> justified the second term of the biological name
> "Homo sapiens" is. Maybe we should all just stand
> around dumbly like cows. Oh, wait! -- we do.
>
> [In all fairness, the witness may have been so
> shaken as to not have had a coherent story, but even
> that fact is useful information. They say in reference
> to Don Iruri only this: "...podemos concluir que esa
> estructura tiene la t?pica caracter?stica de un cr?ter
> explosivo." Or, "...we were able to conclude that
> this structure has the typical characteristics of an
> explosive crater." So he must have described an
> explosion. Details would be nice.]
>
 Chris Peterson
> has suggested airblast effects exaggerate ground
> readings and that 1 to 2 tons TNT is more reasonable.
> Now, Brown suggests 30 tons TNT as a measurement.
> It's possible Don Iruri's story could narrow that down...
> if anybody had asked him.
>
> The LPI Impact Calculator uses the figure of an
> overpressure of 1 pound per sq. inch as a nominally
> perceptible blast force (about equal to an instantaneous
> gust of 35 mph wind). I tried using the equations from:
> http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/fae.htm
> for air-fuel explosions, an event quite similar to an
> impact vaporization. [We are considering only pressure
> effects, not flying debris nor any other possible results.]
>
> The results are that one finds the distance at which
> one would experience an overpressure of 1 pound
> per sq. inch from a one ton TNT explosion is 158
> meters, from a 5 ton event is 270 meters, but from
> a 30 ton event is 490 meters and from a one kiloton
> event is 1500 meters. [Caveat: every actual blast is
> different, affected by surface materials, reflected
> waves, and a long list of modifiers, including the
> unknown efficiency of kinetic energy conversion
> in this impact, so these estimates above have a
> potential 2-fold error in distance.]
>
>
> Sterling K. Webb
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "K. Ohtsuka" <ohtsuka at jb3.so-net.ne.jp>
> To: "Sterling K. Webb" <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net>
> Cc: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 7:15 AM
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event
> ADDITIONAL
>
>
> Hello Sterling,
>
> Thank you for letting me know your translation of
> the Bolivian publications, which is very interesting.
>
> Just before, I visited http://spaceweather.com/,
> where another latest infrasound analysis of the
> Peruvian event by Peter Brown (Univ. W. Ontario)
> is introduced. His team estimated the kinetic energy
> of the impactor about 0.03 kton TNT.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Kastu
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sterling K. Webb" <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net>
> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Cc: "Rob Matson" <mojave_meteorites at cox.net>; "K. Ohtsuka"
> <ohtsuka at jb3.so-net.ne.jp>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 9:14 AM
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event
> ADDITIONAL
>
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I downloaded all the publications on the site (URL below) and
> > started translating then, but...
> >
> > One is the earlier analysis which I already translated and posted
> > a week ago. The two PowerPoint presentations are general
> > presentations of craters (very nicely done, BTW -- muy bueno!)
> > but don't mention Carancas. One is a press-release style .pdf
> > that describes the event and spends a lot of time explaining
> > what a meteorite is, that they come from the asteroids, that there
> > are craters elsewhere on the planet, that the world is not ending,
> > the usual...
> >
> > There are a few more .pdf are press releases. The only document
> > with any "specifics" is their physical estimates of the impact and
> > such, all taken from playing with the LPI online Impact Calculator;
> > I recognize the language! Like I haven't already done that 300 times
> > this last week (and you too).
> >
> > And if you're keeping score, the Bolivians (unlike the Peruvians)
> > got the Universal Time of the event right.
> >
> >
> > Sterling K. Webb
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "K. Ohtsuka" <ohtsuka at jb3.so-net.ne.jp>
> > To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> > Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 9:37 AM
> > Subject: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event
> >
> >
> > Hello list members,
> >
> > I have just reached the Carancas' publication list site in Peru:
> >
> > http://fcpn.umsa.bo/fcpn/app?service=page/Planetarium_PublicationList
> >
> > where some articles have already been introduced by some list members,
> > but the rest ones are not introduced yet and seem indeed interesting,
> > although
> > I cannot understand Spanish at all.
> >
> > Does anyone translate and introduce their summary?
> >
> > Best wishes,
> >
> > Katsu OHTSUKA
> > Tokyo, JAPAN
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > Meteorite-list mailing list
> > Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> > http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
> >
> >
>
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Received on Tue 09 Oct 2007 07:23:35 PM PDT