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Old 02-02-2019, 07:32 PM
gary
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Meteorite fragments come down over Viñales, Cuba

Several news services are running reports that meteorite fragments
have come down over the town of Viñales, Cuba.

A bright flash was seen over Florida followed by a loud sonic boom over
the Pinar del Rio region of western Cuba.

There are reports of glass being shattered but nobody was injured.

Several images are appearing on the web of rock fragments, some of
which may be from the meteorite.

The meteor was also detected by the GOES-16 Lightning Mapper satellite.

Story :-
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/02/s...ock-hits-cuba/

Story :-
https://www.local10.com/news/cuba/cu...act-in-vinales

On a personal note, I spent some time in Viñales in 2015 (snapshot below).
A beautiful rural town and the region is famed for its cigar tobacco (snapshot below).

Just east of here are where the Soviet missile launchers were erected
during the Cuban missile crises.

Just as well the meteorite landed today rather than in October 1962,
as otherwise it may have triggered a global nuclear war.
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Old 03-02-2019, 11:17 AM
gary
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Cool Webcam footage of bolide

Webcam footage at Fort Myer, Florida, caught the bolide around 13:17
local time as it descended toward western Cuba :-

https://twitter.com/ScottWx_TWN/stat...53019710210048
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Old 07-02-2019, 10:34 AM
gary
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NASA: Fireball over Cuba exploded with more energy than 1400 tons of TNT

In a Feb 4th article at CNET, Eric Mack writes :-

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric Mack, CNET
Newly posted data from NASA and US government sensors say the bolide's collision with our atmosphere released as much energy as 1,400 tons of TNT.

Such powerful meteoroid events actually aren't all that rare, but they usually happen over the ocean or unpopulated areas with few potential witnesses. A more powerful blast was actually recorded when a meteor entered the atmosphere off the coast of Madagascar on Sept. 25.
To provide some sense of how much energy 1400 tons of TNT
produces, the Hiroshima bomb was some 15,000 tons, so the Cuban
event was about 9% of that.

The GBU-43/B MOAB (Mother Of All Bombs) which was dropped in
Afghanistan and is said to be the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in
the American arsenal has a yield of 11 tons of TNT, so the Cuban event
was equivalent to about 127 MOAB bombs.

So the explosion over Cuba would certainly get your attention!

The Tunguska event was in a different league again, with a blast
estimated to be equivalent to 1 Megaton.

The largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated had a yield of about 50 Megatons.
There are estimated to be between 10,000 to 15,000
H-bombs at the moment in the world. Given there are about 4037
cities in the world with populations over 100,000 people, there will
be enough H-bombs to share around with just about everyone you know.

Article here :-
https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-fireb...-a-ton-of-tnt/

JPL Fireball and Bolide Data Reported by US Government Sensors (15-Apr-1988 to present), with map, an interesting web page in itself :-
https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/fireballs/
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Old 16-02-2019, 11:35 AM
gary
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Meteor Trajectory software

Quote:
Originally Posted by earthsky.org
The scientific team that used YouTube videos to determine the trajectory of the Chelyabinsk meteor used the same method to track the trajectory of the bright meteor that crossed the sky over Cuba on February 1.
Quote:
Originally Posted by earthsky.org
After reconstructing the trajectory in the atmosphere, the Colombian astronomers “played back” the impact and found that the culprit, a rock with an estimated size of several meters and a weight of about 360 tons, came from an eccentric orbit around the sun with an average distance to our star of 1.3 astronomical units (one astronomical unit = about 93 million miles or 150 million km). Before impacting the Earth, the rock completed a turn around the sun every 1.32 years. All that came to an end on February 1, 2019, when both the rock and the Earth found themselves at the same point in space at the same time.
Article here :-
https://earthsky.org/space/chelyabin...eor-connection


Meteor trajectory determination software :-

Quote:
Originally Posted by MeteorTrajectories, github
In this repository you may find a series of tools used to reconstruct the trajectory of large meteors (super bolides) using public footage.

Most of these tools have been developed by the Solar, Earth and Planetary Physics Group in the Institute of Physics of the University of Antioquia (Medellín, Colombia).

Most of the data and scripts available here, correspond to what we used to reconstruct the atmospheric trajectory of the Cuba 2019 meteor. However, this same tools, and the methods implied, can be applied to reconstruc the trajectory of any other large meteor.

When using this data and tools please cite the following manuscript:

Zuluaga, J. I., Cuartas-Restrepo, Ospina, J., Sucerquia, M. (2019). Can we predict the impact conditions of meter-sized meteoroids?. arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.03980.
https://github.com/seap-udea/MeteorTrajectories


Paper (free) "Can we predict the impact conditions of meter-sized meteoroids?"
by Zuluaga et. al.:-
https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03980
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Old 16-02-2019, 01:35 PM
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Interesting facts, thanks Gary.
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Old 20-02-2019, 09:43 AM
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multiweb (Marc)
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Cuba meteor seen from the air

https://earthsky.org/todays-image/ph...-2019-from-air
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Old 21-02-2019, 12:10 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by multiweb View Post
Thanks Marc!

Wow!
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