[meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2007 19:27:07 -0500
Message-ID: <14c701c80ad4$4b5a4210$b92ee146_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi, All

    The tiniest details yield important information.

    If a multiplicity of witnesses described a "bright
flash," then there is no doubt there was a thermal
event that generated enough heat to produce not a
red glow nor a yellow light but a "bright flash."
That's an explosion, a vaporization event, a big one.

    No object that remains intact generates ANY light
at all on impact, no matter how big or small it is.

    If you assume the force needed to knock a man
down at 300 meters away is the equivalent to a 60
or 70 mph gust of wind, that would require a minimum
of a 20 ton TNT impact; possibly 30, like Brown says.

    It may have been only the less energetic vaporization
of the 5% to 8% of the meteorite that was troilite that
was the "bright flash," rather than the vaporization of
the entire stone. Still, that alone would have been more
than enough of an explosion to shatter the impactor
to fragments (or dust).

    Strangely enough, Peter Brown, who published the
30 ton TNT impact estimate, says "odds are good a
multi-ton monster lurks at the bottom of the crater."

    I say "strangely" because a slow survivable fall (at
a subsonic speed of 300 meters/second) of 30 tons
TNT impact energy would require a 2800 TON impactor
(that's only a mere 6,200,000 pounds!).

    Assuming a density of 2.5, that would be a stone
ball 40 feet in diameter, about the same size as the crater
itself! Didcha see any 40-foot stone balls lying around
Carancas? Maybe it rolled off...

    The only thing I can figure is that the sheer romantic
lure of a monster meteorite waiting to be discovered and
raised from the dark depths of the crater overwhelms
the little gray cells of everybody involved.


Sterling K. Webb
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Farmer" <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
To: "Jan Hattenbach" <jan.hattenbach at web.de>;
<meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 5:27 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL


Jan, I interviewed many people, most saw the fall, saw
a bright flash a small mushroom cloud of steam/dust
that came up and lingered for some time.
Everyone felt the grond shake, and heard huge
explosion. As the meteorite came overhead, there was a
painful sound of a jet engine, only much louder is how
most people described it. One man said he was blown
down be the blast, could be the same guy.
The sounds were loud enough to break windows in
Desaguadero and Carancas, and the impact shook the
ground like an earthquake. Surely this impact would
show up on seismic.

One note though, there are large mines on the Bolivian
side of the border, perhaps they blat a lot so seismic
may not be noticed as much if that is the case.
Michael Farmer
--- Jan Hattenbach <jan.hattenbach at web.de> wrote:

> > 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
> > >
>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > ------
>
=== message truncated ===

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Received on Tue 09 Oct 2007 08:27:07 PM PDT