Comments on: Greensburg meteorite missing

By: Jess Tauber

Jess Tauber — Mon, 14 May 2007 21:47:24 +0000

That piece of steel in NJ had Tony Soprano’s name on it- only three more episodes to try again. Rfff- splat- bada bing!

Jess Tauber

By: jackd

jackd — Mon, 14 May 2007 17:43:51 +0000

Funny thing to me in reading this post is that I distinctly recall seeing the meteorite in a wreckage picture in the newspaper. It was mentioned in the caption, too.

By: Rose

Rose — Mon, 14 May 2007 12:34:49 +0000

Er, how is “bummer” a statement about the relative probability of an event? I think even skeptics can make a comment about whether something sucks when it happens, whether it was likely or not.

Not trying to be flamebait, but the idea bothered me a bit.

By: kvenlander

kvenlander — Mon, 14 May 2007 03:43:13 +0000

Did anybody check if that hunk of stainless steel was *not* a local system product? Now that would be cooler than a meteorite…

By: Kevin Conod

Kevin Conod — Sun, 13 May 2007 21:48:12 +0000

In other interesting meteorite news – turns out the meteorite that fell in NJ back in January isn’t really a meteorite at all. Turns out it was a piece of space junk – a hunk of stainless steel. Interesting, but not a meteorite…

By: Tim G

Tim G — Sun, 13 May 2007 18:44:52 +0000

Samuel Olivieria,
Thanks, but I cannot hold a candle to the great B.A. in his debunking powers.

Stupendous Man,
This was just a back-of-the-envelope â€œguesstimateâ€. I used the drag equation:
The magnitude of the force on a object due to high speed wind is equal to half the density of air times the cross sectional area times the drag coefficient times the speed of the air squared. If you use the kg-meter-second convention for your units, the answer will come out in newtons.

An F5 tornado has wind speeds of 261â€“318 mph. Three hundred miles per hour is about 135 meters per second. The density of air is around 1.3 kg per cubic meter. To estimate the cross-sectional area, I would first need to estimate the volume. The density of pallasite meteorites is about 4760 kg per cubic meter source so a 1000 lbm meteorite (450 kg) would have a volume of 0.095 cubic meters. We can guess the cross-sectional area of such a meteorite if we assume it to be a sphere. It would have a radius of 0.28 meters and therefore a cross sectional area of 0.25 square meters. I then guessed the drag coefficient, (spheres have 0.5 cars typically have around 0.3) I used 0.5. Plugging everything into the equation yields 1500 Newtons, which would be about a third of the weight of the meteorite.

I hope I didn’t make a mistake.

By: Brandon Watts

Brandon Watts — Sun, 13 May 2007 15:32:52 +0000

I hadn’t heard about this humongous meteorite’s disappearance until now, but I sure am glad to hear that they were able to find it. It would be a shame to lose such an incredible specimen, especially when you consider the devastation that’s already taken place over there in Greensburg.

Brandon Watts
Criteo Evangelist