-FUPPETS- Loves Meteors

There is nothing quite like the bright light of a blazing fireball meteor. The footage above comes from various cameras that captured a large and very bright fireball streaking across the Midwestern US skies. The meteor blazed across parts of Iowa and Wisconsin.
Even a space rock as small as a basketball can burn with such heat that it lights up the night sky. -FUPPETS- has been lucky to witness two such fireballs, both in broad daylight. It would be an amazing thing indeed to see one in the middle of the night.

-FUPPETS- SAYS METEORS RULE!

Oh yeah. There is nothing -FUPPETS- loves more than astronomical phenomena.

On September 25th, in western Ontario, a fireball was seen and filmed by various people. This meteor was estimated to be the size of a child's tricycle. When it entered the atmosphere the friction caused it to grow in brightness until it was about 100 times brighter than a full Moon! Amazing! This bad boy was moving about 13 miles per second, which is haul-ass indeed.

Click HERE to be directed to video footage of this amazing fireball.

Some of this footage comes from cameras at the University of Western Ontario, which luckily were positioned to capture this event.

Old Telescope + New Technology = Asteroid Hunting Supreme!

In the near past, it was pure science fiction conjecture to claim that asteroids or other solar system debris would strike the Earth. It was even more ridiculous to suggest that this was an event that happened several times throughout our planet's history. Even plainly visible impact craters, such as the Barringer Crater (or "Meteor Crater" as it is commonly known), were thought to come from volcanic activity.
Here is a view of the Barringer Crater from space. The Crater was originally called Diablo Canyon Crater, then re-named the Barringer Crater after the man who first proposed that this was an impact crater, not a volcanic one.

It was not until Eugene Merle Shoemaker and his research came along in 1963 that it was conclusively shown to be an asteroid impact crater.
Scientists at the University of Arizona's Spacewatch Project are using the telescope at Kitt Peak, outfitted with modern anti-blur video sensors, to scan the skies and track as many asteroids as possible. Here is a video describing their efforts, from Space.com . There are many other such impact craters on the Earth, and it is very likely that there are many asteroids out in our Solar System that could easily strike the Earth. After all, our planet is upwards of 5 Billion years old. Our Sun has at least 10 Billion more years of nuclear fuel left. We humans could be very lucky to have evolved into our modern civilization in the relatively short time span between asteroid impacts. There are many catastrophes that we can do nearly nothing about. Earthquakes are unpredictable and uncontrollable. The same goes for massive volcanic eruptions. Asteroid impact, no matter how far-fetched it may sound, is not just possible, it is probable, and it is the one thing that we can have advance warning of in time to actually do something about it. These things are HAULING MAJOR ASS through the Solar System, and an impact would wipe out almost all life as we know it.

Based on crater formation rates determined from the Earth's closest celestial partner, the Moon, astrogeologists have determined that during the last 600 million years, the Earth has been struck by 60 objects of a diameter of five kilometers or more. The smallest of these impactors would release the equivalent of ten million megatons of TNT and leave a crater 95 kilometers across. For comparison, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, had a yield of 50 megatons.

Meteor "Fireball" Captured on Video

As detailed in a previous -FUPPETS- post, sometimes large meteors enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up as the friction from the gases heats the outer layers of the space rock, sometimes causing it to explode in the process. Other times, the fireball burns until the mass of the meteor is expended. It is a rare event that captures these random fireballs on video, but that is exactly what researchers at the University of Ontario managed to do.

The meteor was spotted by the University of Western Ontario's network of all-sky cameras in southern Ontario that scan the sky for meteors. On Wednesday, Oct. 15 at 5:28 a.m. EDT (0928 GMT) seven of the cameras recorded a bright, slow fireball in the predawn sky. (Space.com)

The video of this fireball can be seen here. It reached an altitude as low as 37-44 miles from the ground.

ASTEROID Explodes Over Africa

There are nearly an infinite number of objects in our Solar System that could potentially strike the Earth. The main barrier to an actual impact is our dense atmosphere. Most anything that comes into our gravity well will be burned up as it enters the atmosphere, creating anything from shooting stars to large fireballs in the sky, depending upon the size of the object. Giant objects, the size of a house or bigger, can have enough mass to not burn up fully, striking the Earth as Meteorites.
-FUPPETS- has experienced a fireball in the sky twice, both in broad daylight over Houston, Texas. It is quite a fantastic sight. One exploded after about a minute of crossing the atmosphere, while another seemed to "bounce off" the atmosphere after blazing for less than a minute. The image below is a relatively close-up view of a fireball meteor. Click the image to enlarge.

-FUPPETS- brings this up because of this article.
Earlier this week a table-sized Asteroid exploded over a remote area of Africa, exploding with the force of over 1 kiloton of TNT.