[meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 17:30:48 -0500
Message-ID: <05c301c896a3$886e1310$8250e146_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi, Jerry, Sean, List,

    The C-sub-d (Coefficient of Drag) of the classic
Volkswagen Beetle is 0.48 to 0.49, which today would
be considered very high indeed, unacceptably so. Of
course, in those days most cars were aerodynamically
the equivalent of a barn door.

    The original Taurus of 1986 had a then-revolutionary
Drag Coefficient of 0.27. Even today, that is very slick
(the most aerodynamic cars of today range from 0.26
to 0.30).

    Apparently more aerodynamic, VW Beetle Generation
Two, today's Beetle, is not aerodynamic at all, with a
C-sub-d of 0.38, one of the least aerodynamic cars you
can buy, a gas-hog and dangerously twitchy at speed. A
simple slab of plywood tacked onto its ass will reduce drag
to 0.28, improve gas mileage, and make it safer to drive:
http://www.max-mpg.com/html/tech/main.htm

    The original Taurus styling was the exact opposite of
the universal styling of the 1980's, which was essentially
rectangular boxes. Taurus style was referred to as "Jelly
Bean" styling and other US auto makers despised it, even
as their sales slipped away. A GM VP was widely quoted
as saying that GM would not change their styling "just
because that's what the consumer wants."

    A Taurus re-style in 1992 to a more rectangular style
degraded the aerodynamics, but the next re-style of 1996
was more aerodynamic (and jelly-bean-like) than the 1986
original. The current Taurus models are about 0.29 drag.


Sterling K. Webb
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jerry" <grf2 at verizon.net>
To: "Sean T. Murray" <stm at bellsouth.net>;
<meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 4:11 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article


True, rather poor choice. I'm just quoting.
Jerry Flaherty
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sean T. Murray" <stm at bellsouth.net>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 4:52 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article


> So... a Ford Taurus is an example of a vehicle with miminal friction?
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jerry" <grf2 at verizon.net>
> To: <cynapse at charter.net>; <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Cc: <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
> Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 3:39 PM
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article
>
>
>> "It's like having a Volkswagen turn into a Ford Taurus," Schultz said,
>> adding
>> that this sort of reshaping is well known to geologists who study islands
>> and
>> land-water interaction. "If you put a big pile of dirt in a stream, that
>> mound
>> will eventually turn into a teardrop shape. It's trying to minimize the
>> friction."
>> Just wht Sterlng has been proposing for the last few months.
>> Jerry Flaherty
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Darren Garrison" <cynapse at charter.net>
>> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
>> Cc: <meteoriteguy at yahoo.com>
>> Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 12:25 PM
>> Subject: [meteorite-list] New, long, Carancas article
>>
>>
>>> Hey, Mike, did you know that you and your team of poachers recovered 10
>>> kilos of
>>> Carancas?
>>>
>>> http://media.www.browndailyherald.com/media/storage/paper472/news/2008/04/04/Features/Professor.Solves.A.Meteor.Mystery-3304236.shtml
>>>
>>> Professor solves a meteor mystery
>>> By: Chaz Firestone
>>> Posted: 4/4/08
>>> Last September, something strange landed near the rural Peruvian village
>>> of
>>> Carancas. Two months later, so did Peter Schultz.
>>>
>>> One was an extraterrestrial fireball that struck the Earth at 10,000
>>> miles per
>>> hour, formed a bubbling crater nearly 50 feet wide and afflicted local
>>> villagers
>>> and livestock with a mysterious illness. The other is the Brown
>>> geologist who
>>> may have figured out why.
>>>
>>> The fiery mass shot across the morning sky bursting and crackling like
>>> fireworks, villagers said after the Sept. 15 impact. An explosive crash
>>> tossed
>>> nearby locals to the ground, shattered windows one kilometer away and
>>> kicked up
>>> a massive dust cloud, covering one man from head to toe in a fine white
>>> powder.
>>> Many thought the streaking fireball - brighter than the sun, by some
>>> accounts -
>>> was an aerial attack from neighboring Chile.
>>>
>>> Curious shepherds and farmers approached the crash site to find a
>>> smoking crater
>>> reminiscent of a Hollywood film, laden with rocks and stirring with
>>> bubbling
>>> water that emitted a foul vapor. But curiosity turned to fear when
>>> unexplained
>>> symptoms began to crop up in Carancas: headaches, vomiting and skin
>>> lesions
>>> struck more than 150 villagers, Peru's Ministry of Health stated days
>>> later.
>>> Locals reported that their animals lost their appetites and bled from
>>> their
>>> noses. Children were restless and cried through the night.
>>>
>>> But according to Schultz, the professor of geological sciences who
>>> visited the
>>> site last December, the true mystery in Carancas is how any of this
>>> happened in
>>> the first place.
>>>
>>> Sophisticated theory and conventional wisdom have long agreed that most
>>> meteors
>>> break into fragments and fizzle out before they can reach the Earth's
>>> surface.
>>> Even those large and durable enough to make it through the atmosphere
>>> hit the
>>> ground as ghosts of their former selves, "plopping out of the sky and
>>> forming a
>>> bullet hole in the Earth," Schultz said. "This meteor crashed into the
>>> Earth at
>>> three kilometers per second, exploded and buried itself into the
>>> ground."
>>>
>>> Last month, Schultz delivered a highly anticipated lecture at the 39th
>>> Lunar and
>>> Planetary Science Conference in League City, Texas. And if he's right,
>>> the bold
>>> theory he proposed there may shake loose a "gut response" entrenched
>>> within the
>>> geological, physical and astronomical sciences: "Carancas simply should
>>> not have
>>> happened."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> A Web of speculation
>>>
>>> The handful of shepherds who happened to lead their Alpaca herds near
>>> the arroyo
>>> that day may have been the first humans ever to witness an explosive
>>> meteor
>>> impact. But the rest of the world quickly got its chance, if
>>> vicariously,
>>> through a flurry of activity in the blogosphere.
>>>
>>> Hundreds of scientists, journalists and captivated amateurs weighed in
>>> on the
>>> bizarre events as they unfolded, offering scores of pet theories and
>>> radically
>>> revising them as more information streamed in from Peru.
>>>
>>> Pravda, a Russian online newspaper born out of a print version run by
>>> the
>>> country's former Communist Party, ran the headline "American spy
>>> satellite
>>> downed in Peru as U.S. nuclear attack on Iran thwarted" five days after
>>> the
>>> impact. The story attributes the villagers' illness to radiation
>>> poisoning from
>>> the satellite's plutonium power generator.
>>>
>>> Other proposed explanations were less sensational. Nevadan wildlife
>>> biologist
>>> and amateur geologist David Syzdek wrote a Sept. 18 blog post titled
>>> "Meteorite
>>> strike in Peru gassing villagers? Maybe not." In it, he proposed that a
>>> mud
>>> volcano producing toxic gases was responsible for both the illness and
>>> the
>>> crater.
>>>
>>> "The Andes are very active geologically so I think there is a good
>>> possibility
>>> that this crater was caused by an outburst of geothermal activity," he
>>> wrote.
>>>
>>> As for the blinding light shooting across the sky, Syzdek chalked it up
>>> to
>>> coincidence.
>>>
>>> "Fireballs are quite common," he wrote. "One possible scenario is that
>>> the
>>> people who saw the fireball just happened on a recently formed mud
>>> volcano while
>>> they were out looking for the fireball impact site."
>>>
>>> Though Pravda and Syzdek drew radically different conclusions from the
>>> reports,
>>> what they shared with each other, many bloggers and even some scientists
>>> was a
>>> healthy skepticism about reports coming out of Peru. Pravda and Syzdek
>>> both
>>> pointed out in their posts that an explosion powerful enough to create
>>> such a
>>> large crater would be equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT, or a tactical
>>> nuclear
>>> strike.
>>>
>>> "When I first saw the news reports, they just didn't seem right," Syzdek
>>> later
>>> said in an interview. "Explosive impacts like this just don't happen."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 'A hyperspeed curveball'
>>>
>>> Gonzalo Tancredi, a Uruguayan astronomer who collaborated with Schultz
>>> in
>>> Carancas, said initial reports of the impact confounded amateurs and
>>> Ph.D.s
>>> alike. Bewildered scientists even entertained the possibility of a hoax
>>> as
>>> rumors floated around the scientific community.
>>>
>>> "At the beginning, there were some doubts about what really happened
>>> there,"
>>> Tancredi said. "We thought maybe it was a meteor fall or maybe it was
>>> something
>>> else, even something fake."
>>>
>>> But when Tancredi visited Carancas a few weeks later, what he observed
>>> silenced
>>> the conspiracies and pointed unequivocally to one conclusion.
>>>
>>> Tancredi interviewed locals, who reported a large mushroom cloud that
>>> formed
>>> over the crater and compression waves that knocked villagers to the
>>> ground. He
>>> also found pieces of soil and rock that had been launched over three
>>> football
>>> fields from the crater - one piece even pierced the roof of a barn 100
>>> meters
>>> away. Combined with analyses of infrasound detectors and the patterns of
>>> crater
>>> "ejecta," the evidence pointed to a genuine and very powerful meteorite
>>> impact.
>>>
>>> But the question that remained on everyone's mind was how the meteor got
>>> there
>>> at all - a scientific riddle that was made even more challenging by
>>> Michael
>>> Farmer.
>>>
>>> Farmer is a controversial figure in the geological community. He is a
>>> meteorite
>>> hunter, a poacher of alien rocks who travels to impact sites around the
>>> world -
>>> usually the "bullet hole in the Earth" type mentioned by Schultz - and
>>> collects
>>> whatever he can find, often brushing up against authorities and other
>>> hunters.
>>> Meteorite hunting is Farmer's full-time job; he profits from selling
>>> what he
>>> finds.
>>>
>>> Farmer, who said he is "totally self-taught" when it comes to meteors,
>>> said he
>>> was as skeptical as the rest when he first heard the reports coming out
>>> of Peru
>>> while on hunt in Spain. But 16 days later, he and his partners found
>>> themselves
>>> staring into the Carancas impact crater, the first Americans on the
>>> scene - and
>>> they stumbled on an extraterrestrial gold mine.
>>>
>>> "We got there and just started picking up pieces off the ground," Farmer
>>> said.
>>> "The entire ground was white, just white powder which was all meteor."
>>>
>>> Farmer and his team eventually accumulated 10 kilograms of small
>>> meteorite
>>> fragments and sold them to private collectors and universities for an
>>> astronomical $100 per gram.
>>>
>>> But despite his rocky past with the geological community, Farmer and his
>>> expensive fragments made a priceless contribution to scientists. Within
>>> minutes
>>> of arriving on the scene, Farmer discovered that the Carancas meteorite
>>> was a
>>> chondrite, or stony meteorite, as opposed to an iron meteorite.
>>>
>>> Though far more common than iron meteorites, chondrites are highly
>>> vulnerable to
>>> ablation - the cracking, eroding and even exploding that occurs when a
>>> meteor
>>> enters the atmosphere and undergoes extreme changes in temperature and
>>> pressure.
>>> As a result, chondrites are far less likely than the more durable iron
>>> meteorites to make it to the Earth's surface in large pieces - which
>>> makes the
>>> Carancas meteorite all the more baffling.
>>>
>>> "For a while, the only information we were getting was from Farmer's Web
>>> site,"
>>> Schultz said. "This was not the type of object you'd expect to get
>>> through the
>>> atmosphere in a tight clump."
>>>
>>> With most pieces of the geological puzzle on the table, the stage was
>>> set for
>>> Schultz to visit the site for himself. But when he arrived there in
>>> December
>>> with a Brown graduate student, Tancredi and Peruvian astrophysicist Jose
>>> Ishitsuka, a budding geologist actually made the crucial discovery.
>>> Scott Harris
>>> GS said he collected some soil samples "initially out of curiosity" to
>>> look for
>>> evidence of shock deformation, which occurs when an object rapidly
>>> decelerates
>>> in cases like impacts or explosions. When Harris looked at the material
>>> under a
>>> microscope, he found tiny mineral grains that had turned into glass
>>> because of
>>> heat and massive shock forces, indicating a very high-speed impact. Here
>>> was yet
>>> another mystifying piece of evidence.
>>>
>>> "At the minimum," Harris said, "this would support a velocity of three
>>> kilometers per second - a real high-velocity explosion instead of just a
>>> plop in
>>> the ground."
>>>
>>> By this time, more reputable scientific theories of the impact had
>>> supplanted
>>> the initial speculation, the most popular of which came from a group in
>>> Germany
>>> and Russia. They proposed that the meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere
>>> at a
>>> very shallow angle, allowing it to reach the surface gradually and avoid
>>> a
>>> sudden increase in pressure - "the difference between diving in and
>>> doing a
>>> belly flop," Schultz said.
>>>
>>> But their theory's relatively low impact velocity of 180 meters per
>>> second, or
>>> about 400 miles per hour, was consistent with every piece of evidence
>>> but
>>> Harris', which pointed to a velocity of about 10,000 miles per hour at
>>> impact.
>>>
>>> "This was nature's way of throwing us a curveball," Schultz said. "A
>>> hyperspeed
>>> curveball."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Changing shape, changing theory
>>>
>>> Back home in Providence, Schultz was now faced with the task of fitting
>>> the
>>> puzzle pieces together into a cohesive theory. And to do it, he looked
>>> to
>>> Earth's closest planetary neighbor, Venus.
>>>
>>> "Our models make predictions about what kind of objects can make it to
>>> the
>>> surface at what velocity, and the Carancas meteor isn't usually one of
>>> them,"
>>> Schultz said. "But Venus has a much denser atmosphere and we still find
>>> craters
>>> on its surface. How did they get there? I think it might be the same
>>> thing
>>> here."
>>>
>>> To explain the alternative theory he developed, Schultz compared a
>>> typical
>>> meteor's descent to a waterskier behind a boat.
>>>
>>> "Normally when you're on the outside of the wake, you're pushed out
>>> further,"
>>> Schultz said. "From my experience looking at Venus, I realized that
>>> there was a
>>> certain condition where the waterskier will stay inside the wake, and
>>> actually
>>> get pushed inward."
>>>
>>> At last month's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Schultz proposed
>>> that
>>> the meteor did break up into pieces, but shock waves created by the
>>> speeding
>>> mass may have kept them close together. And since the meteor descended
>>> as a
>>> clump of fragments instead of one large piece, it reshaped itself along
>>> the way
>>> to become more aerodynamic, like a football or a javelin cutting through
>>> the air
>>> instead of a poorly shaped hunk of rock.
>>>
>>> "It's like having a Volkswagen turn into a Ford Taurus," Schultz said,
>>> adding
>>> that this sort of reshaping is well known to geologists who study
>>> islands and
>>> land-water interaction. "If you put a big pile of dirt in a stream, that
>>> mound
>>> will eventually turn into a teardrop shape. It's trying to minimize the
>>> friction."
>>>
>>> Tancredi, who co-authored the paper with Schultz, Harris and Ishitsuka,
>>> said
>>> Schultz's theory is gaining popularity but is still being debated, even
>>> among
>>> the group that proposed it.
>>>
>>> "This is the hot question right now," he said. "We still have to
>>> demonstrate
>>> that this phenomenon is possible."
>>>
>>> In the meantime, another hot question had remained without a definitive
>>> answer -
>>> the etiology of the strange illness that afflicted the people of
>>> Carancas. But
>>> the group may solve that mystery, too.
>>>
>>> Schultz, Harris and Tancredi all dismissed the possibility of the
>>> meteorite
>>> emitting harmful gases that would sicken villagers. Instead, they
>>> proposed a
>>> simpler cause: the power of the mind.
>>>
>>> The meteorite impact sent out a powerful compression wave that knocked
>>> nearby
>>> villagers and animals to the ground and injected the soil with air,
>>> which later
>>> bubbled up through the crater. Shepherds and cattle may also have
>>> breathed in
>>> the thick dust thrown up by the crash and smelled the sulfurous gases
>>> produced
>>> as water reacted with iron sulfide in the meteor.
>>>
>>> But what the group thinks later spread through the town was not disease,
>>> but
>>> panic.
>>>
>>> "We think it was probably more of a psychological response," Harris
>>> said, adding
>>> that commonplace symptoms like headaches and nausea could easily have
>>> been
>>> caused by the disorienting impact and then mirrored by frightened
>>> villagers.
>>>
>>> Harris also admitted the possibility of the meteorite releasing arsenic
>>> deposits, which are known to exist in Peru, but said it would be very
>>> unlikely
>>> for those gases to have caused the illness.
>>>
>>> "In order to really get arsenic poisoning, you'd need high
>>> concentrations," he
>>> said. "You'd have to be there inhaling the vapor filled with the stuff
>>> right
>>> after the meteorite hit."
>>>
>>> Poisonous or not, the Carancas meteorite could have important
>>> implications for
>>> public safety. Tancredi said there's no reason an impact like this
>>> couldn't
>>> happen in a major city, wiping out a few city blocks. He also pointed
>>> out that
>>> today's most advanced meteor detectors aren't nearly powerful enough to
>>> detect
>>> an object as small as the Carancas meteorite.
>>>
>>> "Near-Earth detectors detect objects that could create a global
>>> catastrophe,
>>> something maybe a kilometer across," he said. "We don't have any kind of
>>> technology that could detect this object before reaching the atmosphere,
>>> so it
>>> will not be possible to know when and where one of these objects could
>>> strike
>>> again."
>>>
>>> But Schultz said the most important lesson to learn from Carancas is
>>> that the
>>> foundation of good science is hard empirical evidence, even - and
>>> especially -
>>> when it contradicts established principle.
>>>
>>> "We tried to understand what the rocks told us rather than looking at
>>> the
>>> theory," he said. "Nature trumps theory, every time."
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> http://www.meteoritecentral.com
>>> Meteorite-list mailing list
>>> Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
>>> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> http://www.meteoritecentral.com
>> Meteorite-list mailing list
>> Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
>> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
>>
>
>
> ______________________________________________
> http://www.meteoritecentral.com
> Meteorite-list mailing list
> Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list

______________________________________________
http://www.meteoritecentral.com
Meteorite-list mailing list
Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Received on Fri 04 Apr 2008 06:30:48 PM PDT