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Originally Posted by Phoenix
hmm wonder if we will be able to see it at night or not...comet showers are cool things to watch
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It'll be about same distance as the moon, so it should be quite a site.
Just hope the fucking computers got the path right. A strike with a 1/2 mile wide meteor would be a monster.
The Asteroid that destroyed the Dinosaurs
It is thought that 65 million years ago in what is now Yucatan the impact at a velocity of 11 km/second of a 10-kilometer wide asteroid is what helped to bring about the K-T extinction, whereas no land animal with a size greater than the size of a small chicken was able to survive.
Those that study this time frame believe that if man had inhabited the planet at this time, he surely would have been destroyed by this particular event. This event threw huge amounts of matter into the atmosphere in addition to this, it caused 2000 foot waves that may have all but completely emptied the Gulf of Mexico. This event created months of darkness (which interfered with photosynthesis) and much cooler temperatures globally, and the resulting harsh conditions which in turn led to the extinction of many species, including the last of the dinosaurs.
Although this is quite compelling as a hypothesis, it remains controversial and has broad but not total acceptance within the scientific community. It is an estimate that impacts of asteroids as large as the one thought responsible for the K-T extinction occur about once every hundred million years.
Documented & Studied Impacts and Events
On the date of June 30th, 1908, at about a quarter after 7:00 a.m., a very mysterious explosion occurred in the skies over Tunguska, Siberia, located in Russia. This explosion happened at anywhere between six-to-eight kilometers from ground zero, and the resultant action in this was to lay waste to a vast region of pine forest of 2,150 square kilometers, felling more than 60 million trees. This was seen as a brilliant burst of light from the inhabitants of the region of 50 kilometers around. Witnesses claim that the explosion was so loud and powerful as to blow-out windows, temporarily blind and knock people to the ground, and sounded like a deafening roar. Had it happened fifty years later, it is surmised by scientists, (placing it within that time-frame of the Cold-War) it would most likely have spurred that nation into a nuclear war.
In 1972, an estimated 1000-ton object skimmed upon the edge of Earth's atmosphere over the Grand Tetons National Park in Wyoming, and then skipped back out into space, like a skimming-stone off water.
This event was photographed by tourists and also was detected by Air Force satellites. Had it approached at a 90° angle into the atmosphere, it most likely would have caused a Hiroshima-scale explosion over Canada, only a bit down-sized from the scale of the Siberian blast.
In 1992, a meteorite weighing 12.4 kg. was recovered after it had made a spectacular appearance over Peekskill, N.Y., where it was described as being as bright as a "full-moon". This event was recorded by 16 separate video cameras, some of which were located at a local high-school football game and were recording the game!
On January 19, 1993, a very bright asteroid crossed the sky of Northern Italy, ending with an explosion approximately over the town of Lugo, Italy. The explosion (14 kilotons of energy) generated shock waves which were recorded by six local seismic stations. This particular type of asteroid did disintegrate at a great altitude, which is quite lucky for the town of Lugo. Had it been an the type of asteroid that would have been composed mostly of iron ferrites, of which only some 6% of all asteroids are known to be comprised as such, chances are that it would have disintegrated at a much lower altitude creating a great deal of death and destruction.
In 1994 the US Department of Defense made public domain its records on energetic bolide-type asteroids over a time span of about twenty years. This data indicates that, from 1975 to 1992, there were 136 airbursts of energy greater than 1 kiloton, but the real number was probably at least 10 times higher, because the satellite system does not cover the entire surface of the Earth.