MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

By Jeremy A. Kaplan, FoxNews – “It turns out the meteor that landed in Russia last week was a bit bigger than the 10 tons first reported. About 1,000 times bigger.

When a hunk of rock raced out of the morning skies over Russia on Friday and exploded with nearly 500 kilotons of energy, early size estimates from the Russian Academy of Sciences that were carried by the Associated Press, Reuters and other news wires pegged it on the small size, with a weight of about 10 tons.

Oops.

Later in the evening, after studying infrasound data from stations around the world, NASA released a new estimate revising that first guess upward by a thousand-fold: The meteorite actually weighed closer to 10,000 tons, scientists said — approximately as much as 170 M1 Abrams tanks.

‘My guess is that someone eyeballed the videos and made an educated guess,’ said Margaret Campbell-Brown, associate professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Western Ontario. ‘This event was so much bigger than anything we’ve seen on video that it doesn’t surprise me the guess was off by three orders of magnitude.’

That poor estimate underscores the daunting task scientists face today: While NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program currently tracks about 10,000 objects through the heavens, there are far, far more smaller objects that are simply too tiny to track.

‘If you think about objects the size of the one that came into Russia, you’re probably looking at 100 million up there. Of those likely to intersect Earth, there’s less, maybe 100,000,’ said K.T. Ramesh, director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute and a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. ‘Space is pretty big.’

And the size of those smaller objects — whether they’re 10 tons or 10,000 tons — makes them impossible to track with current technology, he said.” Read more.

NASA Scrambles For Better Asteroid Detection – “NASA, universities and private groups in the US are working on asteroid warning systems that can detect objects from space like the one that struck Russia last week…  It is financing to the tune of $US5 million a project at the University of Hawaii called Atlas, or Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Alert System. Researchers say ATLAS, which will monitor the entire visible sky every night, will be able to detect objects 45 metres in diameter a week before they hit our planet. For those measuring 150 metres in diameter, the system – which could be operational in late 2015 – will give a three week heads up.” Read more.