* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Meteorites

Blobrana · L

Prairie Meteorite Search

Blobrana · L

RE: Meteorites

Blobrana · L

An identified meteorite is a find indeed.

They can sell anywhere from a few dollars a gram to $1,500 a gram - Nathan Seon as he held what looked like a medium size, odd-shaped rock in his hand.

Seon is a 2007 Prairie Meteorite Searcher.

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Blobrana · L

"A gigantic dragon fell down from the sky, terrifying all the people. In that moment the Earth shook and many people heard the noise."

With these words, an extraterrestrial object made its dramatic entry into Russian history. The account appeared in the "Lavrenty Chronicle" of 1091, describing a hunting trip by Prince Vsevolod near Kiev where he witnessed the apparent fall of a meteorite.
Close to 1,000 years later, samples of what may be that meteorite can be found in the Russian Academy of Sciences' meteorite collection, one of the world's oldest collections of meteorites.
Once stored in the institute's nuclear bomb shelter, the meteorites are now in a new room in the meteorite laboratory. Mikhail Nazarov, a jolly grandfather of 58 and head of the laboratory, walked between two rows of rocks on a recent afternoon, explaining where and when they crash-landed in Russia.

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Blobrana · L

A flash in the sky won't always produce ancient space rocks on the ground.
Meteorites are a rare find.
As the Lyrid meteor shower thrills early risers this week in Colorado, the chances aren't very good that you'll find a piece of the show in your backyard.
According to a Planetary Geologist at the Fiske Planetarium on the C.U. Boulder campus, only one out of 100 "finds" is a true meteorite.

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Blobrana · L

In the true spirit of the British bureaucrat, scientists at a top secret atomic energy research centre were ordered to calculate the precise chances of being killed by a meteorite while out for a stroll.

In 1980, while debates on nuclear safety raged as fiercely as they do today, Whitehall did not consider it good enough to be able to say that there was more chance of being killed in a car crash or any form of natural disaster than falling foul of a Chernobyl-style disaster.
The Health and Safety Executive decided that it was necessary to calculate the exact chances of a range of deaths that included more obvious ones, such as being struck by lightning or hit by a runaway train.
But they also thought that, to place the dangers of nuclear reactor accidents in context, ministers must also be able to refer to the likelihood of the heavens falling on your head.
So the Safety and Reliability Directorate of the UK Atomic Energy Authority came up with an equation. It showed that, statistically speaking, some poor Brit would be squashed by a heavenly body every 7,000 years or so.
Once in every million years, we should expect a meteorite strike that would kill 500 people, although that would presumably depend on whether the chunk of celestial debris flattened Oxford Street at lunchtime or Chewton Mendip on a Sunday morning.
Reassuringly, in a paper released at the National Archives in Kew, the scientists also produced a table relating the size of meteorites, their frequency and their "lethal area - the area within which all life is extinguished by the average meteorite".
This pointed out that eight meteorites of up to 25lb penetrated the atmosphere each year and if they landed would have a lethal area of the size of an average city back garden.
But every 80 years or so a meteorite weighing up to a ton breaks through with a killing zone of 133 acres.
Then, each 100 million years, a meteorite the size of a modest mountain will hit the earth with a lethal area of, roughly speaking, England.

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