Oh, perfect, perfect, perfect. Now were seeing the fireball come in, its brighter than the Sun and then, Kapow, it hits the surface. Jeez! This whole region, downrange, would have been incinerated. It would have been incinerated just by this plasma,...
So this was serial number one. It was built during the Apollo time. I guess because they thought there would be several of them made, but this is the first one and the last one and is the only one like it in the world. This is NASAs Vertical Gun Rang...
Down on the ground, the scale of impact is even more breathtaking.The crater is more than 1000 meters across and nearly 200 meters deep.The forces here were enoumous.The impact on this solid rock into this pulverized mochi,just bustled in your hand.Y...
Really, its a balance between the size of the object, its speed into the atmosphere and critically the altitude at which it explodes. Too high, if its too small and it explodes too high, the shockwave has little effect on the ground. If its quite low...
Most of the damage from an explosion like this is actually the blast wave. Its the very high winds. Mark created a simulation to see what size an asteroid would need to be to be able to generate such destructive power. In this simulation I include mo...
On June 30th, 1908, a huge explosion tore through the forest of Tunguska, Siberia. It was 20 years before the Russians mounted an expedition to the site. What they found astonished them. 60 million trees across an area the size of London had been lev...
So was this a near miss for us? If the asteroid had been in a different part of its orbit, so it didnt hit this year but it hit next year, it would have still hit us on February 15th. But instead of coming in over Russia, it would have come in over t...
There it is! Yep. Its about 90 kilometres up, at that stage, travelling at 17.5 kilometres per second. Using the different camera positions, scientists have pinpointed the exact position at which the meteor entered the atmosphere. And by tracking the...
But there is a downside to Jupiter. It can also deflect asteroids into orbits that cross the Earths path. The Chelyabinsk meteor appears to be one of these typical Earth-crossing events. The likelihood is that it was thrown out of its regular orbit b...
Weknew from the radar measurements where Golevka was within a few tens of metres.And yet it was actually 12 or 15 kilometres away from where it was predicted tobe without Yarkovsky effect. So these very precise radar observations allowedus to see the...