Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL
Hello Sterling, Thank you for letting me know your translation of the Bolivian publications, which is very interesting. Just before, I visited http://spaceweather.com/, where another latest infrasound analysis of the Peruvian event by Peter Brown (Univ. W. Ontario) is introduced. His team estimated the kinetic energy of the impactor about 0.03 kton TNT. Best wishes, Kastu - Original Message - From: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Cc: Rob Matson [EMAIL PROTECTED]; K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 9:14 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL Hi, I downloaded all the publications on the site (URL below) and started translating then, but... One is the earlier analysis which I already translated and posted a week ago. The two PowerPoint presentations are general presentations of craters (very nicely done, BTW -- muy bueno!) but don't mention Carancas. One is a press-release style .pdf that describes the event and spends a lot of time explaining what a meteorite is, that they come from the asteroids, that there are craters elsewhere on the planet, that the world is not ending, the usual... There are a few more .pdf are press releases. The only document with any specifics is their physical estimates of the impact and such, all taken from playing with the LPI online Impact Calculator; I recognize the language! Like I haven't already done that 300 times this last week (and you too). And if you're keeping score, the Bolivians (unlike the Peruvians) got the Universal Time of the event right. Sterling K. Webb -- -- - Original Message - From: K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 9:37 AM Subject: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event Hello list members, I have just reached the Carancas' publication list site in Peru: http://fcpn.umsa.bo/fcpn/app?service=page/Planetarium_PublicationList where some articles have already been introduced by some list members, but the rest ones are not introduced yet and seem indeed interesting, although I cannot understand Spanish at all. Does anyone translate and introduce their summary? Best wishes, Katsu OHTSUKA Tokyo, JAPAN __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL
Hi, After reading through those other documents on the Major University of San Andres website and concluding that they contained nothing we didn't already know, I realized I hadn't read the footnotes in the one article that had footnotes, and indeed I found one new piece of information in those footnotes: one local inhabitant of Carancas, Don Gregorio Iruri, was standing only 300 meters from the point of impact at the time of the impact. That's all, a one-sentence footnote. It astounds me that an investigator, scientific or otherwise, had located an eye-witness to as rare an event as a cosmic impact but did not ask questions nor collect his story! What did it look like? What did it sound like? Was there a flash of light? How bright was it? How strong was the shock wave? How strong was the wind from the blast? Was he knocked down? Rolled over? Or did he stay on his feet? Was he deafened, even slightly? And about 1000 other questions... The closest living witness to a cosmic impact among the planet's 6.6 billion people and no one asked him to describe it? Makes me wonder how justified the second term of the biological name Homo sapiens is. Maybe we should all just stand around dumbly like cows. Oh, wait! -- we do. [In all fairness, the witness may have been so shaken as to not have had a coherent story, but even that fact is useful information. They say in reference to Don Iruri only this: ...podemos concluir que esa estructura tiene la típica característica de un cráter explosivo. Or, ...we were able to conclude that this structure has the typical characteristics of an explosive crater. So he must have described an explosion. Details would be nice.] Close witness information would probably make it possible to determine the magnitude of the blast within closer limits than at present. The Peruvian seismic measurement was 5 tons TNT. Chris Peterson has suggested airblast effects exaggerate ground readings and that 1 to 2 tons TNT is more reasonable. Now, Brown suggests 30 tons TNT as a measurement. It's possible Don Iruri's story could narrow that down... if anybody had asked him. The LPI Impact Calculator uses the figure of an overpressure of 1 pound per sq. inch as a nominally perceptible blast force (about equal to an instantaneous gust of 35 mph wind). I tried using the equations from: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/fae.htm for air-fuel explosions, an event quite similar to an impact vaporization. [We are considering only pressure effects, not flying debris nor any other possible results.] The results are that one finds the distance at which one would experience an overpressure of 1 pound per sq. inch from a one ton TNT explosion is 158 meters, from a 5 ton event is 270 meters, but from a 30 ton event is 490 meters and from a one kiloton event is 1500 meters. [Caveat: every actual blast is different, affected by surface materials, reflected waves, and a long list of modifiers, including the unknown efficiency of kinetic energy conversion in this impact, so these estimates above have a potential 2-fold error in distance.] Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 7:15 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL Hello Sterling, Thank you for letting me know your translation of the Bolivian publications, which is very interesting. Just before, I visited http://spaceweather.com/, where another latest infrasound analysis of the Peruvian event by Peter Brown (Univ. W. Ontario) is introduced. His team estimated the kinetic energy of the impactor about 0.03 kton TNT. Best wishes, Kastu - Original Message - From: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Cc: Rob Matson [EMAIL PROTECTED]; K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 9:14 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL Hi, I downloaded all the publications on the site (URL below) and started translating then, but... One is the earlier analysis which I already translated and posted a week ago. The two PowerPoint presentations are general presentations of craters (very nicely done, BTW -- muy bueno!) but don't mention Carancas. One is a press-release style .pdf that describes the event and spends a lot of time explaining what a meteorite is, that they come from the asteroids, that there are craters elsewhere on the planet, that the world is not ending, the usual... There are a few more .pdf are press releases. The only document with any specifics is their physical estimates of the impact and such, all taken from playing with the LPI online Impact Calculator; I recognize the language! Like I haven't already done that 300 times this last week
Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL
The Peruvian seismic measurement was 5 tons TNT. This may sound odd, but where is that number from? I was talking to a geologist of the University of Arequipa, and he told me that they did record nothing at the time of the event. Regards, jan -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gesendet: 10.10.07 00:02:42 An: K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Betreff: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL Hi, After reading through those other documents on the Major University of San Andres website and concluding that they contained nothing we didn't already know, I realized I hadn't read the footnotes in the one article that had footnotes, and indeed I found one new piece of information in those footnotes: one local inhabitant of Carancas, Don Gregorio Iruri, was standing only 300 meters from the point of impact at the time of the impact. That's all, a one-sentence footnote. It astounds me that an investigator, scientific or otherwise, had located an eye-witness to as rare an event as a cosmic impact but did not ask questions nor collect his story! What did it look like? What did it sound like? Was there a flash of light? How bright was it? How strong was the shock wave? How strong was the wind from the blast? Was he knocked down? Rolled over? Or did he stay on his feet? Was he deafened, even slightly? And about 1000 other questions... The closest living witness to a cosmic impact among the planet's 6.6 billion people and no one asked him to describe it? Makes me wonder how justified the second term of the biological name Homo sapiens is. Maybe we should all just stand around dumbly like cows. Oh, wait! -- we do. [In all fairness, the witness may have been so shaken as to not have had a coherent story, but even that fact is useful information. They say in reference to Don Iruri only this: ...podemos concluir que esa estructura tiene la típica característica de un cráter explosivo. Or, ...we were able to conclude that this structure has the typical characteristics of an explosive crater. So he must have described an explosion. Details would be nice.] Chris Peterson has suggested airblast effects exaggerate ground readings and that 1 to 2 tons TNT is more reasonable. Now, Brown suggests 30 tons TNT as a measurement. It's possible Don Iruri's story could narrow that down... if anybody had asked him. The LPI Impact Calculator uses the figure of an overpressure of 1 pound per sq. inch as a nominally perceptible blast force (about equal to an instantaneous gust of 35 mph wind). I tried using the equations from: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/fae.htm for air-fuel explosions, an event quite similar to an impact vaporization. [We are considering only pressure effects, not flying debris nor any other possible results.] The results are that one finds the distance at which one would experience an overpressure of 1 pound per sq. inch from a one ton TNT explosion is 158 meters, from a 5 ton event is 270 meters, but from a 30 ton event is 490 meters and from a one kiloton event is 1500 meters. [Caveat: every actual blast is different, affected by surface materials, reflected waves, and a long list of modifiers, including the unknown efficiency of kinetic energy conversion in this impact, so these estimates above have a potential 2-fold error in distance.] Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 7:15 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL Hello Sterling, Thank you for letting me know your translation of the Bolivian publications, which is very interesting. Just before, I visited http://spaceweather.com/, where another latest infrasound analysis of the Peruvian event by Peter Brown (Univ. W. Ontario) is introduced. His team estimated the kinetic energy of the impactor about 0.03 kton TNT. Best wishes, Kastu - Original Message - From: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Cc: Rob Matson [EMAIL PROTECTED]; K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 9:14 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL Hi, I downloaded all the publications on the site (URL below) and started translating then, but... One is the earlier analysis which I already translated and posted a week ago. The two PowerPoint presentations are general presentations of craters (very nicely done, BTW -- muy bueno!) but don't mention Carancas. One is a press-release style .pdf that describes the event and spends a lot of time explaining
Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL
Jan, I interviewed many people, most saw the fall, saw a bright flash a small mushroom cloud of steam/dust that came up and lingered for some time. Everyone felt the grond shake, and heard huge explosion. As the meteorite came overhead, there was a painful sound of a jet engine, only much louder is how most people described it. One man said he was blown down be the blast, could be the same guy. The sounds were loud enough to break windows in Desaguadero and Carancas, and the impact shook the ground like an earthquake. Surely this impact would show up on seismic. One note though, there are large mines on the Bolivian side of the border, perhaps they blat a lot so seismic may not be noticed as much if that is the case. Michael Farmer --- Jan Hattenbach [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Peruvian seismic measurement was 5 tons TNT. This may sound odd, but where is that number from? I was talking to a geologist of the University of Arequipa, and he told me that they did record nothing at the time of the event. Regards, jan -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gesendet: 10.10.07 00:02:42 An: K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Betreff: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL Hi, After reading through those other documents on the Major University of San Andres website and concluding that they contained nothing we didn't already know, I realized I hadn't read the footnotes in the one article that had footnotes, and indeed I found one new piece of information in those footnotes: one local inhabitant of Carancas, Don Gregorio Iruri, was standing only 300 meters from the point of impact at the time of the impact. That's all, a one-sentence footnote. It astounds me that an investigator, scientific or otherwise, had located an eye-witness to as rare an event as a cosmic impact but did not ask questions nor collect his story! What did it look like? What did it sound like? Was there a flash of light? How bright was it? How strong was the shock wave? How strong was the wind from the blast? Was he knocked down? Rolled over? Or did he stay on his feet? Was he deafened, even slightly? And about 1000 other questions... The closest living witness to a cosmic impact among the planet's 6.6 billion people and no one asked him to describe it? Makes me wonder how justified the second term of the biological name Homo sapiens is. Maybe we should all just stand around dumbly like cows. Oh, wait! -- we do. [In all fairness, the witness may have been so shaken as to not have had a coherent story, but even that fact is useful information. They say in reference to Don Iruri only this: ...podemos concluir que esa estructura tiene la típica característica de un cráter explosivo. Or, ...we were able to conclude that this structure has the typical characteristics of an explosive crater. So he must have described an explosion. Details would be nice.] Chris Peterson has suggested airblast effects exaggerate ground readings and that 1 to 2 tons TNT is more reasonable. Now, Brown suggests 30 tons TNT as a measurement. It's possible Don Iruri's story could narrow that down... if anybody had asked him. The LPI Impact Calculator uses the figure of an overpressure of 1 pound per sq. inch as a nominally perceptible blast force (about equal to an instantaneous gust of 35 mph wind). I tried using the equations from: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/fae.htm for air-fuel explosions, an event quite similar to an impact vaporization. [We are considering only pressure effects, not flying debris nor any other possible results.] The results are that one finds the distance at which one would experience an overpressure of 1 pound per sq. inch from a one ton TNT explosion is 158 meters, from a 5 ton event is 270 meters, but from a 30 ton event is 490 meters and from a one kiloton event is 1500 meters. [Caveat: every actual blast is different, affected by surface materials, reflected waves, and a long list of modifiers, including the unknown efficiency of kinetic energy conversion in this impact, so these estimates above have a potential 2-fold error in distance.] Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 7:15 AM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL Hello Sterling, Thank you for letting me know your translation of the Bolivian publications, which is very interesting. Just before, I visited http://spaceweather.com/, where another latest
Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL
I also spoke to quite some peoble and I have no doubt that there was a seismic. I do not question that. I just would like to know who recorded it. It's just that I am a bit confused by the statement of the geologist. Jan -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: Michael Farmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gesendet: 10.10.07 00:27:26 An: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Betreff: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL Jan, I interviewed many people, most saw the fall, saw a bright flash a small mushroom cloud of steam/dust that came up and lingered for some time. Everyone felt the grond shake, and heard huge explosion. As the meteorite came overhead, there was a painful sound of a jet engine, only much louder is how most people described it. One man said he was blown down be the blast, could be the same guy. The sounds were loud enough to break windows in Desaguadero and Carancas, and the impact shook the ground like an earthquake. Surely this impact would show up on seismic. One note though, there are large mines on the Bolivian side of the border, perhaps they blat a lot so seismic may not be noticed as much if that is the case. Michael Farmer --- Jan Hattenbach [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Peruvian seismic measurement was 5 tons TNT. This may sound odd, but where is that number from? I was talking to a geologist of the University of Arequipa, and he told me that they did record nothing at the time of the event. Regards, jan -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gesendet: 10.10.07 00:02:42 An: K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Betreff: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL Hi, After reading through those other documents on the Major University of San Andres website and concluding that they contained nothing we didn't already know, I realized I hadn't read the footnotes in the one article that had footnotes, and indeed I found one new piece of information in those footnotes: one local inhabitant of Carancas, Don Gregorio Iruri, was standing only 300 meters from the point of impact at the time of the impact. That's all, a one-sentence footnote. It astounds me that an investigator, scientific or otherwise, had located an eye-witness to as rare an event as a cosmic impact but did not ask questions nor collect his story! What did it look like? What did it sound like? Was there a flash of light? How bright was it? How strong was the shock wave? How strong was the wind from the blast? Was he knocked down? Rolled over? Or did he stay on his feet? Was he deafened, even slightly? And about 1000 other questions... The closest living witness to a cosmic impact among the planet's 6.6 billion people and no one asked him to describe it? Makes me wonder how justified the second term of the biological name Homo sapiens is. Maybe we should all just stand around dumbly like cows. Oh, wait! -- we do. [In all fairness, the witness may have been so shaken as to not have had a coherent story, but even that fact is useful information. They say in reference to Don Iruri only this: ...podemos concluir que esa estructura tiene la típica característica de un cráter explosivo. Or, ...we were able to conclude that this structure has the typical characteristics of an explosive crater. So he must have described an explosion. Details would be nice.] Chris Peterson has suggested airblast effects exaggerate ground readings and that 1 to 2 tons TNT is more reasonable. Now, Brown suggests 30 tons TNT as a measurement. It's possible Don Iruri's story could narrow that down... if anybody had asked him. The LPI Impact Calculator uses the figure of an overpressure of 1 pound per sq. inch as a nominally perceptible blast force (about equal to an instantaneous gust of 35 mph wind). I tried using the equations from: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/fae.htm for air-fuel explosions, an event quite similar to an impact vaporization. [We are considering only pressure effects, not flying debris nor any other possible results.] The results are that one finds the distance at which one would experience an overpressure of 1 pound per sq. inch from a one ton TNT explosion is 158 meters, from a 5 ton event is 270 meters, but from a 30 ton event is 490 meters and from a one kiloton event is 1500 meters. [Caveat: every actual blast is different, affected by surface materials, reflected waves, and a long list of modifiers, including the unknown efficiency of kinetic energy conversion in this impact, so these estimates above have a potential 2-fold error in distance
Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL
Don't know about seismic, but it appears to have shown up on infrasonic: [from spaceweather.com] *PERUVIAN METEORITE UPDATE: *On Sept. 15th, a fireball streaked across the skies of Peru and soon thereafter a watery crater http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2007/08oct07/crater.jpg was discovered by local residents near the town of Carancas. At first experts dismissed the connection; the crater didn't look like a meteorite impact. But since then minds have changed: Without reservation this is definitely a meteorite, says astronomy professor Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario. We found some infrasound http://aquarid.physics.uwo.ca/infrasound.htm data recorded by a station in La Paz about 70 km away. From the size of the the airwave we can work out the kinetic energy of the impactor--about 0.03 kton TNT. Something like 20 to 30 kg of the meteorite have already been recovered, but odds are good a multi-ton monster lurks at the bottom of the crater, he continues. The bad news: It is below the water table, the rainy season is coming and unless some action is taken ASAP, the rock will quickly oxidize and crumble. [more http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2007/08oct07/07_09_21_Carancas_meteorite.pdf] Meanwhile, he says, we are digging for seismic data of the actual impact--the first actual seismic recording of a terrestrial meteorite impact! Stay tuned. Michael Farmer wrote: The sounds were loud enough to break windows in Desaguadero and Carancas, and the impact shook the ground like an earthquake. Surely this impact would show up on seismic. One note though, there are large mines on the Bolivian side of the border, perhaps they blat a lot so seismic may not be noticed as much if that is the case. Michael Farmer __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL
Hi, Jan, List, http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5isWWHSxCh_u0yUNU9Gpk1qfg996A ...More details emerged when astrophysicist Jose Ishitsuka of Peru's Geophysics Institute reached the site about 6 miles from Lake Titicaca. He confirmed that a meteorite caused a crater 42 feet wide and 15 feet deep, the institute's president, Ronald Woodman, told The Associated Press on Thursday. Ishitsuka recovered a 3-inch magnetic fragment and said it contained iron, a mineral found in all rocks from space. The impact also registered a magnitude-1.5 tremor on the institute's seismic equipment - that's as much as an explosion of 4.9 tons of dynamite, Woodman said. Local residents described a fiery ball falling from the sky and smashing into the desolate Andean plain... The IGP has been quoted in the Peruvian press as essentially making the claim that they, rather than INGEMMET, should be in charge of the meteorite, its recovery and preservation. It is possible to interpret the term a fiery ball falling from the sky as meaning that the object was in ablative flight all the way to the ground (has been observed elsewhere, so not impossible). That would mean an impact velocity equal to or greater than 2000 meters/second. 5 TNT tons energy = 21,000,000,000 joules. At 2000 m/s, it would require a 10,500 kilo (10.5 ton) impactor. Some might say that's unlikely. A one TNT ton impact at 2000 m/s would need only a 2 ton impactor, and so on You can fiddle with these figures yourself. Here's the kinetic energy calculator: http://www.csgnetwork.com/kineticenergycalc.html and the Megaton (TNT) joules converter: http://www.unitconversion.org/energy/joules-to-megatons-conversion.html Or, one gram of TNT = 4184 Joules.[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaton Crash a few bolides! Sterling K. Webb -- - Original Message - From: Jan Hattenbach [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 5:20 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL The Peruvian seismic measurement was 5 tons TNT. This may sound odd, but where is that number from? I was talking to a geologist of the University of Arequipa, and he told me that they did record nothing at the time of the event. Regards, jan -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gesendet: 10.10.07 00:02:42 An: K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Betreff: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL Hi, After reading through those other documents on the Major University of San Andres website and concluding that they contained nothing we didn't already know, I realized I hadn't read the footnotes in the one article that had footnotes, and indeed I found one new piece of information in those footnotes: one local inhabitant of Carancas, Don Gregorio Iruri, was standing only 300 meters from the point of impact at the time of the impact. That's all, a one-sentence footnote. It astounds me that an investigator, scientific or otherwise, had located an eye-witness to as rare an event as a cosmic impact but did not ask questions nor collect his story! What did it look like? What did it sound like? Was there a flash of light? How bright was it? How strong was the shock wave? How strong was the wind from the blast? Was he knocked down? Rolled over? Or did he stay on his feet? Was he deafened, even slightly? And about 1000 other questions... The closest living witness to a cosmic impact among the planet's 6.6 billion people and no one asked him to describe it? Makes me wonder how justified the second term of the biological name Homo sapiens is. Maybe we should all just stand around dumbly like cows. Oh, wait! -- we do. [In all fairness, the witness may have been so shaken as to not have had a coherent story, but even that fact is useful information. They say in reference to Don Iruri only this: ...podemos concluir que esa estructura tiene la típica característica de un cráter explosivo. Or, ...we were able to conclude that this structure has the typical characteristics of an explosive crater. So he must have described an explosion. Details would be nice.] Chris Peterson has suggested airblast effects exaggerate ground readings and that 1 to 2 tons TNT is more reasonable. Now, Brown suggests 30 tons TNT as a measurement. It's possible Don Iruri's story could narrow that down... if anybody had asked him. The LPI Impact Calculator uses the figure of an overpressure of 1 pound per sq. inch as a nominally perceptible blast force (about equal to an instantaneous gust of 35 mph wind). I tried using the equations from: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/fae.htm for air-fuel explosions, an event quite similar to an impact vaporization. [We are considering only pressure
Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL
Hi, All The tiniest details yield important information. If a multiplicity of witnesses described a bright flash, then there is no doubt there was a thermal event that generated enough heat to produce not a red glow nor a yellow light but a bright flash. That's an explosion, a vaporization event, a big one. No object that remains intact generates ANY light at all on impact, no matter how big or small it is. If you assume the force needed to knock a man down at 300 meters away is the equivalent to a 60 or 70 mph gust of wind, that would require a minimum of a 20 ton TNT impact; possibly 30, like Brown says. It may have been only the less energetic vaporization of the 5% to 8% of the meteorite that was troilite that was the bright flash, rather than the vaporization of the entire stone. Still, that alone would have been more than enough of an explosion to shatter the impactor to fragments (or dust). Strangely enough, Peter Brown, who published the 30 ton TNT impact estimate, says odds are good a multi-ton monster lurks at the bottom of the crater. I say strangely because a slow survivable fall (at a subsonic speed of 300 meters/second) of 30 tons TNT impact energy would require a 2800 TON impactor (that's only a mere 6,200,000 pounds!). Assuming a density of 2.5, that would be a stone ball 40 feet in diameter, about the same size as the crater itself! Didcha see any 40-foot stone balls lying around Carancas? Maybe it rolled off... The only thing I can figure is that the sheer romantic lure of a monster meteorite waiting to be discovered and raised from the dark depths of the crater overwhelms the little gray cells of everybody involved. Sterling K. Webb --- - Original Message - From: Michael Farmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Jan Hattenbach [EMAIL PROTECTED]; meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 5:27 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL Jan, I interviewed many people, most saw the fall, saw a bright flash a small mushroom cloud of steam/dust that came up and lingered for some time. Everyone felt the grond shake, and heard huge explosion. As the meteorite came overhead, there was a painful sound of a jet engine, only much louder is how most people described it. One man said he was blown down be the blast, could be the same guy. The sounds were loud enough to break windows in Desaguadero and Carancas, and the impact shook the ground like an earthquake. Surely this impact would show up on seismic. One note though, there are large mines on the Bolivian side of the border, perhaps they blat a lot so seismic may not be noticed as much if that is the case. Michael Farmer --- Jan Hattenbach [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Peruvian seismic measurement was 5 tons TNT. This may sound odd, but where is that number from? I was talking to a geologist of the University of Arequipa, and he told me that they did record nothing at the time of the event. Regards, jan -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gesendet: 10.10.07 00:02:42 An: K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Betreff: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL Hi, After reading through those other documents on the Major University of San Andres website and concluding that they contained nothing we didn't already know, I realized I hadn't read the footnotes in the one article that had footnotes, and indeed I found one new piece of information in those footnotes: one local inhabitant of Carancas, Don Gregorio Iruri, was standing only 300 meters from the point of impact at the time of the impact. That's all, a one-sentence footnote. It astounds me that an investigator, scientific or otherwise, had located an eye-witness to as rare an event as a cosmic impact but did not ask questions nor collect his story! What did it look like? What did it sound like? Was there a flash of light? How bright was it? How strong was the shock wave? How strong was the wind from the blast? Was he knocked down? Rolled over? Or did he stay on his feet? Was he deafened, even slightly? And about 1000 other questions... The closest living witness to a cosmic impact among the planet's 6.6 billion people and no one asked him to describe it? Makes me wonder how justified the second term of the biological name Homo sapiens is. Maybe we should all just stand around dumbly like cows. Oh, wait! -- we do. [In all fairness, the witness may have been so shaken as to not have had a coherent story, but even that fact is useful information. They say in reference to Don Iruri only this: ...podemos concluir que esa estructura tiene la típica característica de un cráter explosivo. Or, ...we were
Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL
You wrote: It may have been only the less energetic vaporization of the 5% to 8% of the meteorite that was troilite that was the bright flash rather then the vaporization of the entire stone. Still, that alone would have been enough to shatter the impactor into fragments (or dust). If that were the scenario, would an observation posted to the list on 10/5 by Piper R. W. Hollier seem a reasonable expectation: Troilite dissociates at high temperatures (e.g. hypersonic impact), releasing hot sulphur vapor, which in turn will oxidize in air to form sulphur dioxide, a very irritating poison. At the time Piper's theory as to why all the sickness was reported seemed to me to be the best explanation for the reports. Would the above scenario support that notion? Charlie D. __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL
Hi, Yes, the fact that the dissociation of the troilite would explain the strange odors and reported illnesses convinces me that it got at least that hot. Troilite's vapor point is 700 K. or 427 C. and it would dissociate immediately in the presence of water or even just humidity. That even sets a lower limit to the heat produced by the impact. It could always have generated more heat than that. At impact, the kinetic energy of the stone goes from being potential energy to being thermal energy. The entire object's temperature is instantly increased. The troilite goes from a cold solid to a hot vapor and in so doing expands many times in volume... or tries to. I haven't worked out the actual ratio of increase because you don't have to. ALL solid to gas transitions increase volume and/or pressure by a huge factor; that's how explosives work. So, no big rock in the mudpit, but maybe lots of fragments. Recovering them would tell you a lot. The stuff found outside the crater was blasted off the backside of the object by the shock of the impact and wasn't subjected to the full heating. But stuff from inside the crater would reveal whether there was any rock melt, or even rock vaporization. Thermal alteration would establish how hot it got and that would let you calculate the impact speed very reasonably. A total absence of fragments is unlikely. There would be some of the free iron from the meteorite at a minimum, even if the rock was pulverized. Water appears to be moving through the crater, though; it's in a riverbed. Material is being washed away constantly. It may be too late, or perhaps only heavy items will remain. And the rainy season is coming, as Mike tried to point out to the local authorities. You can only do what you can do. It's been almost a month. I wonder how long it will take the Peruvians to mobilize? Sterling K. Webb - - Original Message - From: Charlie Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 8:02 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL You wrote: It may have been only the less energetic vaporization of the 5% to 8% of the meteorite that was troilite that was the bright flash rather then the vaporization of the entire stone. Still, that alone would have been enough to shatter the impactor into fragments (or dust). If that were the scenario, would an observation posted to the list on 10/5 by Piper R. W. Hollier seem a reasonable expectation: Troilite dissociates at high temperatures (e.g. hypersonic impact), releasing hot sulphur vapor, which in turn will oxidize in air to form sulphur dioxide, a very irritating poison. At the time Piper's theory as to why all the sickness was reported seemed to me to be the best explanation for the reports. Would the above scenario support that notion? Charlie D. __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event
Hello list members, I have just reached the Carancas' publication list site in Peru: http://fcpn.umsa.bo/fcpn/app?service=page/Planetarium_PublicationList where some articles have already been introduced by some list members, but the rest ones are not introduced yet and seem indeed interesting, although I cannot understand Spanish at all. Does anyone translate and introduce their summary? Best wishes, Katsu OHTSUKA Tokyo, JAPAN __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event
Sorry the link is by Mayor de San Andres Universitys Web site (UMSA) in Bolivia. Katsu - Original Message - From: K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 11:37 PM Subject: Publications of the Carancas event Hello list members, I have just reached the Carancas' publication list site in Peru: http://fcpn.umsa.bo/fcpn/app?service=page/Planetarium_PublicationList where some articles have already been introduced by some list members, but the rest ones are not introduced yet and seem indeed interesting, although I cannot understand Spanish at all. Does anyone translate and introduce their summary? Best wishes, Katsu OHTSUKA Tokyo, JAPAN __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event
). --- end --- The pictures in the article are pretty good. One of them, showing a big shape of the free metal phase looks almost the same as a photo I've seen of Portales: http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Sept05/PSRD-PortalesValley.pdf There is also a big jpeg microphoto (800+Kb) at http://fcpn.umsa.bo/fcpn/app?service=external/PublicationDownloadsp=232 Very detailed; I would call it high resolution. Interesting rock. Obviously, it has been shocked all to hell and not in landing (this time), full of fractures and fissures on every scale, numerous breaks, with what I think is their description of impact melt, and is 7-8% glasses. I'm not sure what they mean by glasses, but to me it says that this rock has had a rough life history, a hot time in the old solar system... Please, Listo-Petrologists, comment! Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 9:37 AM Subject: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event Hello list members, I have just reached the Carancas' publication list site in Peru: http://fcpn.umsa.bo/fcpn/app?service=page/Planetarium_PublicationList where some articles have already been introduced by some list members, but the rest ones are not introduced yet and seem indeed interesting, although I cannot understand Spanish at all. Does anyone translate and introduce their summary? Best wishes, Katsu OHTSUKA Tokyo, JAPAN __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event ADDITIONAL
Hi, I downloaded all the publications on the site (URL below) and started translating then, but... One is the earlier analysis which I already translated and posted a week ago. The two PowerPoint presentations are general presentations of craters (very nicely done, BTW -- muy bueno!) but don't mention Carancas. One is a press-release style .pdf that describes the event and spends a lot of time explaining what a meteorite is, that they come from the asteroids, that there are craters elsewhere on the planet, that the world is not ending, the usual... There are a few more .pdf are press releases. The only document with any specifics is their physical estimates of the impact and such, all taken from playing with the LPI online Impact Calculator; I recognize the language! Like I haven't already done that 300 times this last week (and you too). And if you're keeping score, the Bolivians (unlike the Peruvians) got the Universal Time of the event right. Sterling K. Webb - Original Message - From: K. Ohtsuka [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 9:37 AM Subject: [meteorite-list] Publications of the Carancas event Hello list members, I have just reached the Carancas' publication list site in Peru: http://fcpn.umsa.bo/fcpn/app?service=page/Planetarium_PublicationList where some articles have already been introduced by some list members, but the rest ones are not introduced yet and seem indeed interesting, although I cannot understand Spanish at all. Does anyone translate and introduce their summary? Best wishes, Katsu OHTSUKA Tokyo, JAPAN __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
