back to article NASA said a 60ft space alien menacing Earth wouldn't harm us: Tell THAT to Nicaragua

The Nicaraguan government reckons a meteorite that created a huge hole in the ground just outside its capital's main airport may have been part of the 2014 RC asteroid that skimmed past Earth at the weekend. Some NASA experts aren't so sure, however. In fact, they've practically ruled it out. Nicaraguan meteorite Nicaraguan …

  1. phil dude
    Thumb Up

    kinda cool...

    if this really is a crash site, I find it sort of cool that we as a planet can find it so quickly.

    I mean, a use for social media, who knew....

    P.

    1. FrankAlphaXII

      Re: kinda cool...

      I'd think about that statement a little bit first.

      Yes it means we can communicate quickly. But the reason is that it was communicated so quickly was because it was at a location near a large military facility, the Air Force base in Managua, which is also the Capital's Airport and probably the busiest in the country. I'm amazed no one saw it.

      Had this occurred in the middle of nowhere in Nicaragua (what I'd refer to as "Bum Fuck Egypt", or BFE for short), nobody would ever know but some farmers who are to a decent degree ex-Sandinistas and Contras that both know big explosions tend to mean trouble, and maybe some drug mules here and there. The world would find out, but much less quickly.

      It shows we pay attention to our military facilities and their industrial support much faster than we do to our general population. Chelyabinsk also kind of proved this, it occurred in a place not located 40 miles from a gigantic nuclear weapons laboratory and a populated area, and people knew worldwide within seconds if you count a bunch of VK posts along the lines of WTF is happening? Had it happened in the middle of nowhere near the Northern Lena River in the Sakha Republic in Russia, noone would have known for weeks. Or maybe ever, if the object was undetected by scientists and the Ballistic missile warning systems.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: kinda cool...

        It would have been detected even if it hit the most remote places in Antarctica or in the middle of the ocean. The shock waves left infrasound traces that circled the globe twice and took a day to fully dissipate.

        It might have taken a bit longer to figure out what that sound WAS if there was no one there to see it fall or hear the audible shockwave, but Chelyabinsk was not something that was only noticed because of its proximity to a nuclear weapons facility.

        1. Shrimpling

          Re: kinda cool...

          So what you are saying is if a meteorite falls and nobody see it, then it still makes a sound?

        2. Psyx

          Re: kinda cool...

          "It would have been detected even if it hit the most remote places in Antarctica or in the middle of the ocean. The shock waves left infrasound traces that circled the globe twice and took a day to fully dissipate."

          Really? from a 1 tonne of TNT blast?

          If so, I'm impressed. I suspect that we can't detect such small blasts a day later, but I'd be pleased to find out otherwise.

          (However, I wouldn't be surprised if there are plenty of early warning satellites which are capable of noticing something hot and heavy lighting up the atmosphere on entry.)

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: kinda cool...@FrankAlphaXII

        "Had this occurred in the middle of nowhere in Nicaragua (what I'd refer to as "Bum Fuck Egypt", or BFE for short), nobody would ever know but some farmers who are to a decent degree ex-Sandinistas and Contras that both know big explosions tend to mean trouble, and maybe some drug mules here and there."

        That big swoosh above the atmosphere was evidently no comet or meteor, it was simply the roar of red-neck generalisations hurtling out of the pages of Huckleberry Finn and menacing a whole selection of developing countries. Fortunately with the exception of one particularly rancid comment that fell to earth and caused a hedgehog to explode in Nicuragua, the toxic ball of hill-billy wisdom has rushed off round the Sun, and may return to cause offence in a few hundred years hence unless space defences can ward it off.

        And whilst it's on-topic, remind me again who armed and funded the Contras as part of an illegal destabilisation plot?

      3. cray74

        Re: kinda cool...

        "Had it happened in the middle of nowhere near the Northern Lena River in the Sakha Republic in Russia, noone would have known for weeks. Or maybe ever, if the object was undetected by scientists and the Ballistic missile warning systems."

        Except meteorite falls in wilderness get noted frequently and rapidly. Between 2000 and early 2002 alone, meteorite falls were spotted in BFE Canada, BFE Yemen, BFE Burkina Faso, BFE Tunisia, BFE Sudan, BFE Uzbekistan, BFE Morocco, and BFE Nigeria. Those were all noted immediately and reported promptly.

  2. Daedalus
    Boffin

    107,200

    That's the distance, in km, that the Earth moves every hour. So the two rocks had to be at least ~1.3 million km apart. So yes, they had nothing at all to do with each other.

    Just shows that government press people are dim as the old NAAFI candle.

    1. jamesb2147

      Re: 107,200

      Hey, that's the Nicaraguan First Lady you're talking about! (Read: She's not just a "government press person," she's actually highly influential in politics, moreso than most First Lady's, and disturbingly out of touch with science.)

      I'm guessing this was an explosive. The interesting thing is that it might not be from the civil war (Somoza) or Contra era; there's evidently a small, but new, wave of violence sweeping the country. We may see more of this in the future, and it may turn out that the political leaders or military were looking for an alternative explanation to distract from the fact that they don't know what caused this.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: 107,200

        "...that's the Nicaraguan First Lady...she's actually highly influential in politics..."

        Big deal. Nicaragua has a 28 out of 100 corruption score by Transparency International. Scores range from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). It also ranks 125 out of 177 countries for "most corrupt". (For example, Afghanistan ranks 175 out of 177.)

        The bottom line is something, probably an old weapon that fell off some Soviet plane 30+ years ago, went off. And the Nicaraguan government does not want to admit it.

        1. Random Yayhoo

          Re: 107,200

          Sure, there's a good chance of it being an unstable buried shell going bang.

          But the question is whether they can nail down the time of impact. That would determine conclusively whether a straggling orphan of the meteor hit. The crater tells the story of a trajectory or a in situ event. If the event's timing is nailed down, one can easily find whether any relationship exists to a parent meteor.

        2. Psyx

          Re: 107,200

          "And the Nicaraguan government does not want to admit it."

          Why leap to such an conspirational assumption? If it was a conspiracy, then the government would have sealed it off and not given meteor-science-boffins access.

          Occam's razor would point to it having been mistakenly identified, partly due to the cognitive bias of knowing that another big rock sailed by at - to laymen - what seemed the right time.

    2. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: 107,200

      Actually, you need to calculate the relative velocity of 2014 RC with respect to Earth. According to NASA this figure is 10.95 km/s. Assuming the mystery object was traveling in the same orbit, it would be a "mere" 512,460 km behind 2014 RC. They could be related of course (if they share the same orbit, they almost certainly share the same origin).

      I think the most telling bit is that nobody spotted the lights in the sky. An impact like this comes from a very bright meteor, so if somebody was sitting on their veranda and heard the explosion, they would have seen it with their eyes closed.

      1. Tom 7

        Re: 107,200 very bright meteor???

        It would have been very bright but it doesnt need to be very bright near the impact crater.

        I'm not sure how fast is needs to be travelling to light up but you can manage several machs before you start to glow. A rock of a few pounds could easily travel unlit from over the horizon* before making a bloody great hole like that.

        * having lit up an empty sea spectacularly.

        1. Psyx

          Re: 107,200 very bright meteor???

          "* having lit up an empty sea spectacularly."

          Which would show on satellite imagery. And a more horizontal path would surely have made noise that would have been heard in the wake of the impact?

          My money is on conventional explosives and a cock-up in initial interpretation.

    3. I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

      Symmetry?

      Was the so called whatever it was called doing 107,200 in the opposite direction?

      Or is there a reason all meteor scars are craters?

    4. cray74

      Re: 107,200

      "That's the distance, in km, that the Earth moves every hour. So the two rocks had to be at least ~1.3 million km apart. So yes, they had nothing at all to do with each other."

      I'm not sure distance along would confirm that. It takes surprisingly little time for a fragmented asteroid to spread over a great distance. Astronomers don't use distance between asteroids to figure out if asteroids are related because they spread too far too rapidly. Instead, they use inclination and distance from the Sun to recognize common origins.

      For example, comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fragmented due to a close pass with Jupiter in 1992. By the time it machine-gunned Jupiter in 1994, Shoemaker Levy 9 had spread into a string of debris 4.9 million kilometers long - about 4 times the separation of Pitbull and the alleged Nicaraguan meteorite.

      My personal guess is that an explosion outside a Nicaraguan military air base means "lost bomb or land mine," particularly since the impact was so small (small debris tends to burn up before hitting the ground) and no bolide was noted in a well-populated area. But the separation between Pitbull and this explosion shouldn't necessarily mean they're unrelated.

  3. Efros

    Michael Fish

    Moved on from hurricanes in his new job?

  4. Version 1.0 Silver badge

    Not all collisions are high speed

    The earth's toddles along at about 67,000 mph around the sun so if it caught up with a rock doing more or less the same speed in a similar orbit and going in the same direction then the actual collision speed could be relatively modest. I doubt that an atmospheric re-entrance speed of a couple of thousand mph would generate a trail but it would cause a decent crater.

    The more interesting thing is that the majority of the earths surface is water so more than half the time nobody ever sees these impacts.

    1. Bilby

      Re: Not all collisions are high speed

      The minimum speed for a meteor is about 11.2km/sec. Any rock that is scarcely moving relative to Earth will accelerate to at least that speed due solely to gravity - essentially that is the speed to which an object will accelerate if dropped from a stationary position (relative to Earth) at an infinite height.

      It isn't possible for a meteor to fall to Earth any slower than that; a 'couple of thousand mph' is an order of magnitude slower than the lowest possible speed. Faster speeds are, of course, quite possible.

      1. James O'Shea

        Re: Not all collisions are high speed

        "The minimum speed for a meteor is about 11.2km/sec"

        Errm... not quite correct. Yes, that's escape velocity, and yes, an object would hit the Earth after falling from rest relative to it with that velocity... if you neglect _air resistance_ and the angle of impact and a few other minor problems. Small, rocky, objects tend to either burn up or simply explode long before they hit anything solid. It's the large objects that you have to worry about. This site http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/ which is a joint project between Imperial College, London, and Purdue University in Indiana, may help give you a feel for what happens to smaller rocks.

        Now, a nice big projectile, made of mostly iron ore, moving at a good velocity, coming straight down into fairly deep water, _that's_ something you gotta be ware of. I once calculated what might happen if whatever it was which made Tycho crater hit somewhere in the North Sea. It wasn't pretty.

        1. itzman

          Re: Not all collisions are high speed

          A good day to test a kinetic energy orbital weapon?

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Not all collisions are high speed

          "I once calculated what might happen if whatever it was which made Tycho crater hit somewhere in the North Sea. It wasn't pretty."

          This could explain Scunthorpe, Clacton, Hull, South Shields, Filey. I hope your work was published.

        3. I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

          Re: Not all collisions are high speed

          "an object would hit the Earth after falling from rest relative to it with that velocity... if you neglect _air resistance_ and the angle of impact and a few other minor problems. Small, rocky, objects tend to either burn up or simply explode long before they hit anything solid."

          With a symmetrical impact it should be easy to formulate the answers you pose.

          There is only one angle of impact (out of 180 x 360) that will form an hemisphere. The air will have the same resistance of 30 inches of mercury or 35 inches of lead -maybe some 50 inches and more of armour steel.

          However wobble wouldn't have taken place for quite some time in the 60 or so miles we consider the atmosphere in a perpendicular decent. Maybe the last 7 miles. And even then nothing for it to get excited about. I am assuming it was moving fast enough to cause slip-streaming.

      2. Version 1.0 Silver badge

        Re: Not all collisions are high speed

        "The minimum speed for a meteor is about 11.2km/sec" - that rather depends on the mass of the object... a lump of iron is going to come down fast (think the Hoba meteorite ... it's about 60 tons) relatively small and compact. Now think about something weighing about 60 ton except that it's mostly ice and carbon with a rocky center - possibly non-spherical ... that's going to land a lot softer and what does get to the surface will be a lot smaller.

        Luckily for the space program, not everything lands at 11 km/s.

  5. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    How weird

    The Chelyabinsk interloper also had nothing to do with the other earth-grazing asteroid that everyone was observing coming from another direction and still the close encounter and the impact occurred closely together in time.

    Can we get Fox Mulder out from the basement again?

  6. Alan Brown Silver badge

    Meteorites

    Are generally cold. The streak of light happens very high up, not at ground level (if it did there would've been a mushroom cloud from the impact energies vaporising the bolide.)

  7. Fluffy Bunny
    Facepalm

    Stumped?

    Shortly after World War II, the owner of a mansion in the UK wanted a tree stump removed. Well, the local army chaps were happy to oblige. After all, since the war had ended, they had had nothing to do for ages. And all those leftover explosives...

    As they were setting the charges, the owner asked if they were sure it wasn't too close to the mansion after all, but was assured that they had checked their sums twice.

    Well, after having blown out all of the windows in the mansion, they went over their sums again and it turned out that they had gotten a decimal point in the wrong place. Sorry about all that. If you ever need another tree stump removed, you know where to call us, wot?

    An inexplicable crater in Nicaragua? Well, it's obvious where our guys went to after they retired.

    1. Al Jones

      Re: Stumped?

      One of the first what you might call "family friendly" videos I remember seeing on the Internet back in the early 90's was a news-clip from the 70's of the problems encountered by the Oregon Highway Departments when attempting to dispose of a dead whale washed up on a beach:

      http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL20AF0A7EE84DB46F

      The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds

  8. Roger Varley

    Trees still standing?

    Looking at the first picture, the trees in the vicinity of the crater appear to be remarkably undamaged.

    1. Psyx

      Re: Trees still standing?

      Not really.

      Meteors of the size cited don't 'explode' as in 'high explosive' and create a vast over-pressure. There's no real reason why they should be knocked down.

      It takes a sh*t ton of pressure to knock trees over. Ever seen a car hit one or driven a car into one? They don't budge. Or photos of WW1 battlefields churned to muddy hell, with plenty of trees still standing?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Trees still standing?

      > Looking at the first picture, the trees in the vicinity of the crater appear to be remarkably undamaged.

      Apart from those at the immediate edge having been stripped of every single leaf by the blast!

  9. WonkoTheSane
    Mushroom

    Obligatory Mythbusters quote:-

    "When in doubt, C4!"

  10. hammarbtyp
    Black Helicopters

    Is that a black helicopter i see?

    Hmmm, Large crater appears near major Air Force base.

    Maybe it's my tinfoil hat, but there seems a more obvious explanation than a meteorite strike

  11. tony2heads
    Joke

    Pitbull dropped a large one in the woods

  12. F111F

    Call Harrison Ford..

    ...looks like we found one of the leftover paper bombs from operation "Clear and Present Danger".

  13. kryptonaut
    Alien

    ULLA!

    "The end of the cylinder was being screwed out from within. Nearly two feet of shining screw projected. Somebody blundered against me, and I narrowly missed being pitched onto the top of the screw. I turned, and as I did so the screw must have come out, for the lid of the cylinder fell upon the gravel with a ringing concussion. I stuck my elbow into the person behind me, and turned my head towards the Thing again. For a moment that circular cavity seemed perfectly black. I had the sunset in my eyes.

    I think everyone expected to see a man emerge--possibly something a little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a man. I know I did. But, looking, I presently saw something stirring within the shadow: greyish billowy movements, one above another, and then two luminous disks--like eyes. Then something resembling a little grey snake, about the thickness of a walking stick, coiled up out of the writhing middle, and wriggled in the air towards me--and then another."

  14. Mudslinger

    Pedant alert

    I can cope with either spelling of metre (although the American version is just wrong) but not when both are used in the same sentence to mean the same thing.

    Metre - unit of length

    Meter - displays something measured

  15. Vociferous

    Why do they even think a meteorite made that crater?

    Rather than, say, an anti-tank mine or ten kilos of TNT?

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