“… This just in: a large object has been found under the rubble. What I can see of the… object itself doesn’t look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I’ve seen. It looks more like a huge cylinder. .. [snip.] .. Just a minute! Something’s happening! Ladies and gentlemen, this is terrific! This end of the thing is beginning to flake off! The top is beginning to rotate like a screw! The thing must be hollow…”

Classic! Great one.

@72. Calli Arcale :

Skeptic @ 61: yes, that’s a joke. He’s quoting from “War of the Worlds”. (The radio play version, not the original book.)

Actually reminds me more of the Jeff Wayne Musical version.

@56. Paul : “When you hear hoofbeats, do you think horses, or unicorns?”

Depends what show I’m watching really!

@9 MessierTidy … I remember Starblazers, but the memory is much better than the show. I tried to re-watch it a few years ago and I coudn’t believe how cheesy it was.

Well, yeah, there’s always a nostalgia factor at work with memories of old shows and, yeah, it was cheesy at times but StarBlazers was still a superluminous cartoon and I still love it.

The music is pretty timeless and emotionally powerful too.

And please remember, at no time should you stand in front of the Wave motion emitter.

Too right!

@58. CR & #43. Digital Atheist :

When a satellite reenters, it slows to terminal velocity, at most a few hundred kilometers/hour and definitely sub-sonic, long before it hits the ground. The damage it would cause is about the same as an airplane of the same mass crashing, except most satellites carry little or no fuel, and most airplanes are stuffed to the gills with gasoline or jet fuel (so a small but loaded airplane would do much more damage.) To do this much damage, a satellite would have to have 10s of tons of mass survive reentry. Something like UARS, breaking up into many pieces (which is typical), would be scattered over many square kilometers, and no one piece would be large enough to do anything like this. Also, there would be lots of other smaller pieces in the area.

As to UARS in particular, the last reported orbit (which is totally consistent with all previous reports, confirmed by many independent observers) was 135 x 140 km, at about 0230 GMT Saturday. Even if it had exploded at apogee, it is physically impossible for any fragment to have had a perigee greater than 140 km (90 miles). No object with a perigee that low can survive more than one or two orbits. Even with an extremely high apogee, the fragments would have all reentered withing 12 to 24 hours. (There is no evidence of any such explosion, and no debris was tracked in any orbit that could be attributable to UARS, but such an explosion is the only way to have prevented some fragment of UARS to have survived more than a few hours.) The Argentina incident occurred more than a day too late to have been caused by UARS.

Reentry would have come near perigee, which would have been at approximately the same latitude as the explosion, which would have had to occur while UARS was over the northern Pacific or Canada. (The post-explosion orbits of the fragments would be ellipses with the perigee at the point of the explosion. The Earth would be rotating under the fragments, so subsequent perigees could occur at any longitude, but the latitude would always be 45 to 55 degrees North.)

tl;dr: There’s no way it was UARS.

A natural object (such as a comet or meteoroid) enters the atmosphere at a much higher velocity and with much more energy (e=(1/2)mv^2) than a satellite and, if dense and massive enough, can reach the ground at much higher than its terminal velocity. It could do extensive damage, especially if it exploded in the lower atmosphere. Tunguska was an immensely larger event than this, though. It didn’t make a crater or leave any identifiable debris, but it knocked down trees (all pointed directly away from the blast center) for 50 to 70 kilometers, and was recorded on seismographs throughout Europe and Asia. Tunguska occurred over soggy, swampy soil with many peat bogs and small lakes. Any surviving meteorites could have easily been swallowed up, especially since it was 13 years before an expedition reached the site. The Argentina site is in a populated area, the terrain is definitely firm enough to build houses on, and fire investigators are already examining the wreckage. I don’t think there’s any danger of debris from either a satellite or meteorite being missed.

It’s looking increasingly like a propane explosion, so most of my post is probably completely irrelevant, but maybe the next time something like this happens, people will look back at this incident and this will help them answer or at least ask the right questions.

Greetings,

areanfg
Lomas de Zamora, Argentina.

Hmm .. deady@73 already confirmed it was gas (and from a gas tank at that).

I bet this disaster was Griswold-induced as well.

http://www.infobae.com/notas/607835-Detuvieron-al-hombre-que-vio-el-cometa-y-centran-las-pericias-sobre-las-garrafas.html (es)

This definitely can’t be UARS; far too much devastation for that. I suspect the cause will prove to be terrestrial.