

California Meteor Broke Speed Record for Atmospheric Entry - tokenadult
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/12/20/california-meteor-broke-speed-record-for-atmospheric-entry/

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Sharlin
The title is misleading; as the actual article states, it was the highest
entry velocity recorded for _recovered meteorites_. It's not atypical that
your run-of-the-mill shooting stars enter at relative velocities of over 50
km/s; for example, the entry velocity of the objects in the well-known Leonid
swarm is circa 72 km/s.

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tzaman
End of world attempt gone wrong :)

~~~
robodale
The Klendathu will try again, but we will fight them...and we will win.

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maeon3
How much warning did we have for this Nuclear sized explosion to happen over
California? Why am I just now hearing about this after the event? Are these
asteroids that unpredictable to track?

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Sharlin
It's currently not feasible to track such small objects. Fortunately, there's
no real need to - a kiloton-scale explosion high in the atmosphere is pretty
much a non-event. Asteroids circa 10m in diameter impact the atmosphere
approximately once per year - no casualties have ever been recorded from such
events (actually, there are no human casualties from _any_ impact event in the
recorded history.)

The real blind spot currently lies in the 100m scale - these could cause
massive local damage on impact (cf. Tunguska) and there are no comprehensive
tracking programs in place at the time. Such events are predicted to occur
every 100 to 1000 years (but the probability of hitting a densely inhabited
area is still extremely low.)

