Meteor impact video....??

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Dangus</i>
<br />I remember one time on the Discovery Channel, there was a guy in upstate New York(I think), who's car got hit by one in the middle of the night. It hit the rear passenger side of the trunk and blasted a hole clean through it. Some collector gave him like 27,000 dollars for the car and another 75,000 for the meteorite.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">This incident is legendary. The owner of the car -- a VW Beatle -- first applied to his insurance company to recover for damages to the car, and was told his policy did not cover meteor strikes. But as word got out, that matter became moot. Think what the car and meteorite might have brought if eBay had been in full swing 10-15 years ago! -|Tom|-

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I think it would almost require a radar tracking camera array that could detect meteors and aquire the image automatically, zoom and all.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote"> The Cloudbait Observatory is an economy version of that---sans radar and zoom. What you're proposing might be worth the investment if you knew it would be in the right place at the right time. Trouble is ... really spectacular meteors only happen every few months; half of them occur in daylight; another half are obscured by clouds; 90% are over remote areas of the ocean, polar regions or unpopulated areas; they are usually over before a camera can be aimed at them; high resolution radar takes several minutes to scan the whole sky, and it's expensive as hell; you need simultaneous pix from at least three widely-seperated angles to triangulate the position of the meteor.

Our best hope may be the proliferation of cell phones with cameras (nearly a billion now in use). Training the public to be good observers seems like a waste---training everyone when most will never get an opportunity to use the training.

The dozens of eyewitness reports of the fireball I saw last March (no longer accessible at Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory One report of it still posted .) are full of contradictions. There's no way that even a fourth of them could accurately describe the meteor that I saw. I am ashamed to admit my own observation was far short of what I was capable of. I didn't realize, at the time, that I was seeing something worth reporting. The factors that make it noteworth are the slow angular motion, the duration and the apparent impact at the end. Had I realized its importance, I would have taken precise measurements immediately, instead of several days later. I would have immediately conducted a search for witnesses who had a better vantage point than I did---something that I did only half-heartedly weeks later. I heard rumors of people who saw it hit the ocean, but I never managed to track them down.

Yeah, I agree, the technology is probably not there yet. I think a passive scanning radar that was tuned to look for objects of a specific range of density, and specific sizes would be required. NORAD can already track them. NORAD can even track a wrench dropped by a space crew, given enough time to find it. Obviously they're equipment is seriously expensive and none of us can hope to come close to that any time soon. I'm thinking that if this is ever to be practical, it'd be designed much like how missile defense lasers are designed. It would track the object, and then the camera array would be on a "gyroscopic" sort of mount, which would point the camera at it, possibly hit it with a laser to rangefind it, and then get footage of it.

I would say that in 10 years, that sort of technology shouldn't be too hard to cook up for the average American scientist. That is, if technology continues to progress at the rate it currently is....

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"Regret can only change the future" -Me

"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." Frank Herbert, Dune 1965

I'm sure there must be some satellites already up there which could photographically record the tracks of big meteors like the one I saw last March. It's just a matter of programming them not to ignore what is now being discarded as anomalous data. If you got two such images, you could tell if and where it impacted Earth. Even one satellite photo would be better than a hundred eye-witnesses. The trouble with eye-witness reports is lousy observing and contradictory reports. Of fifty some reports on the meteor I saw, only a handful are compatible.

There is a way to know in advance where (small) meteorites will hit. If we launch a 'bucket of gravel' and start throwing pebbles at the earth in a controlled way, we could have all our cameras ready. And we could factor in parameters such as object size, shape, composition, speed, angle of entry, time of day, you name it.
As long as the pieces are not too big there is no chance of doing any harm, I would say.

What would we expect to learn from such an experiment that we don't already know?

What we need is a way of homing in on the impact sites of real ET meteorites, which are quite valuable for the info they yield about what's "out there". That requires 24-7 monitoring of areas which may not yield anything for decades. The best we can afford is to enlist of the help of equipment that is already in use for other purposes. This includes radar, sonic detection systems, seismic networks, satellites and most recently, hundreds of millions of cell phones with built-in cameras.

More importantly, we need advance knowlege of when a really big meteor may impact in a populated area. The meteor that skipped across the Pacific last March, as far as the public knows, was never detected on radar. Had it come down vertically in a city, it might have been another Hiroshima. Perhaps our radar defense network, intended to protect us from missiles, did record it; but making that public would tell potential enemies how vulnerable we are to missile attack. Anyway, that system is probably not capable of providing the kind of advance warning that would allow evacuation of a meteor's target area.

For more info on what we are doing to find asteroids before they hit us, check out NASA's Near Earth Object Program .