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Aslkahuna wrote:Don't know if it hit in NYC exactly, but yes it was videotaped from a football stadium where a game was in progress. The car was owned by a teenaged girl and the trunk was pretty mangled.
Steve
Extremeweatherguy wrote:When did your incident occur? Because the Canadian fireball mentioned in the article above happened last Thursday night.Cyclone1 wrote:I was driving home, happened to look up at the exact right time, and saw it. I had a friend driving in front of me, we pulled over and confirmed that we had indeed both seen it. It was crazy, I couldn't believe what I had just seen. I got home, saw the news article, but was surprised to hear Canada...
http://www.canada.com/story.html?id=982880Meteor likely broke on entry
Scientists, collectors scramble to locate fallen space debris
Hanneke Brooymans, with files from Richard Cuthbertson, Calgary Herald , Edmonton Journal
Published: Saturday, November 22, 2008
A fireball spotted by hundreds of people Thursday likely broke into pieces that landed around the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, said a Calgary meteorite expert.
More than 400 people reported seeing the object, said Alan Hildebrand, co-ordinator of the Canadian Fireball Reporting Centre at the University of Calgary. This is by a large margin a record response and it was a tremendous help in narrowing down the fall area, he added.
The scientist estimates the rock that hurtled into the atmosphere likely weighed between one and ten tons. Such large fireballs are rare, he said, with only a couple streaking over Canadian skies a year.
"This is literally a billion watt bulb in the sky," he said.
"That doesn't happen every day. This thing was illuminating the ground over hundreds of kilometres."
Hildebrand said he was heading for the possible meteorite fall site Friday evening. He wants to talk to people in the area while their memories of the fireball are still fresh. He also wants to review security camera footage that may have caught the meteor on tape before they deleted.
Hundreds of little meteorites probably fell from the fireball as it tore across the sky, Hildebrand said.
The meteor expert is especially interested in hearing from people in the Wainwright, Provost, Chauvin and Ribstone areas. (Anyone with specific information from that area can report a sighting to http://miac.uqac.ca or can leave a message for Hildebrand at (403) 220-2291.)
The meteor that fell through the sky may have broken into hundreds of meteorites of various sizes. Landowners should look on their property for unusually shaped dark grey or black rocks that are denser than average rocks.
Frank Florian thinks the search for the meteorite is at the mercy of Mother Nature.
"As soon as the snow falls, there's no chance of finding anything until springtime," said Florian, community astronomer at the Telus World of Science.
The brightness of the fireball may have misled people into thinking it fell close by, Florian said.
While hundreds of people reported seeing the meteor, Chris Herd is anxiously awaiting a report from someone who found a piece of it.
"The sooner it's picked up the better, for scientific reasons," said Herd, a University of Alberta associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences.
Meteorites that aren't quickly recovered become weathered and rusty and less representative of their original composition and elemental make-up.
The vast majority of meteorites come from an asteroid belt of rocks between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, he said.
Rocks are liberated from their belt every now and then when the orbit of Jupiter disrupts the orbit of the rocks and sends propels them towards the sun. Meteors can spend millions of years going around the sun before eventually being drawn into the gravitational pull of the Earth.
Robert Haag has made a living for the past 30 years buying and selling meteorites and other space debris that has fallen to Earth.
The American meteorite collector is offering $10,000 to anyone who can locate the first one-kilogram chunk of the meteorite that fell in the region Thursday evening.
He says the people with the best chance of finding the fireball are the ones who heard the sonic boom made by the falling meteorite chunks.
"If you hear that, then you're probably within 30 kilometres of it," Haag said.
Even luckier would be to see the physical evidence firsthand.
"The best thing you can hope for," Haag added, "is someone saying, 'What the hell happened to my tractor?' or 'Who put a hole in my chicken coop?' "
The University of Calgary's Hildebrand said he guesses the rock might have dropped southwest of Manitou Lake in western Saskatchewan and he is heading to the area to speak with witnesses.
"Typically what we're able to do is to narrow it down to a township or two and then you (let the) landowners in those areas know they may have meteorites in their field," he said.
(well the disappearing part at least.....until spring thaw).A tale of two meteorites
Alberta researchers are tracing the history of two space rocks. The first cratered in the west central part of the province roughly 1,100 years ago. The second streaked through the sky Thursday night.
That Was Then
900 AD
Size: The chunk of asteroid is estimated to have been a metre in diameter.
Impact: It didn't break up before it hit the ground and carved a crater. Using LiDAR data, they created an image of the area without any vegetation. It revealed a crater 36 metres wide and six metres deep.
Location: Whitecourt, 200 kilometres west of Edmonton. Scientists used remote sensing technology called LiDAR to find the crater, which was hidden by trees.
Speed: It was travelling an estimated two kilometres per second when it hit.
The rock: A hunk of iron mixed with nickel.
This is Now
Last Thursday
Size: It weighed about 10 tonnes when it entered Earth's atmosphere (estimated to be 2 metres across)
Impact: It broke up before it hit the ground, scattering debris that scientists are hoping to recover.
Location: The fireball lit up the skies of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and the scientists hope to locate the space rocks in Western Saskatchewan.
Speed: It was travelling at 14 kilometres per second.
The rock: More crumbly, with iron distributed throughout.
THE GLOBE AND MAIL // PHOTO: ANDREW BARTLET
. MEDIA ADVISORY
Fragments of 10-tonne space rock located near Lloydminster from Nov. 20 fireball
The remains of a 10-tonne asteroid that exploded in the sky near the Alberta/Saskatchewan border on November 20, 2008 have been located by University of Calgary researchers in a rural area near the city of Lloydminster.
Planetary scientist Dr. Alan Hildebrand and graduate student Ellen Milley located several fragments of meteorite late Thursday afternoon and are conducting a search of the area to collect some of the estimated thousands of meteorite fragments densely strewn over an estimated 20-square-kilometre area near the Battle River.
Hildebrand and Milley will be available for media interviews and photo opportunities in the search area on Friday, Nov. 28 at 1 pm (Mountain Time).
Girding for a meteoric rise in popularity
A Saskatchewan community is preparing for a rush of treasure hunters after several chunks of potentially valuable space rock were found nearby
KATHERINE O'NEILL
koneill@globeandmail.com; With a report from The Canadian Press
November 29, 2008
MARSDEN, SASK. -- Marsden, a tiny Saskatchewan farming community that hugs the Alberta boundary, is preparing itself for a stampede of people hunting for prized cosmic treasure after several meteorites were recovered nearby.
"Yee-haw, they finally found something," Glenda Hankins, co-owner of the Marsden Hotel, said yesterday after it was revealed that two University of Calgary researchers were the first to locate valuable space rocks on top of a frozen pond late Thursday.
U of C planetary scientist Alan Hildebrand, who was involved in the successful search, estimates thousands more could be strewn over a debris field north of Marsden that is estimated to be as large as 20 square kilometres.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... /Prairies/
Locals have already dubbed it the Marsden Meteorite. The community of 275 people is about 250 kilometres northwest of Saskatoon.
University of Calgary student http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=1009418 that got the thrill of a lifetime when she found bits of meteorite from a fireball that lit up the sky over Alberta and Saskatchewan last week. (I'd lift it but I haven't been able to post pictures......I'm guessing I'll have to get my own uploader
Master's student Ellen Milley was with meteorite expert Alan Hildebrand searching south of Lloydminster on Thursday afternoon when she noticed some dark bits on a small frozen pond.
The first dark mass they investigated was a disappointment-- it turned out to be a leaf. But the next one proved to be a cosmic treasure: a 250-gram piece of black space rock, part of the 10-tonne meteorite that fell from the sky.
Alberta's record of 14. 
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... airie.htmlMeteorite hunters are having a field day - literally - following the discovery of dozens of fragments from a 10-tonne space rock that exploded over the Canadian prairie on 20 November.
A large search team will scour the area on Wednesday in hopes of finding more pieces and mapping out the extent of the debris field before the terrain is covered in snow. "The quicker we get them, with the least amount of water contact, the better," says Ellen Milley, a graduate student at the University of Calgary.
As of Monday evening, she and colleagues had picked up more than 60 meteorites from a 24-square-kilometre patch of windswept grassland and frozen waterways near the town of Marsden, Saskatchewan.
Amateur treasure seekers who flocked to the area in droves over the weekend have walked away with many more pieces, including a 13-kilogram chunk found by a father and son from Alberta.
"The most difficult things is telling the meteorites apart from the cow patties," Milley told New Scientist.
The event is proving to be one of the most fruitful meteorite searches in recent memory, says Alan Hildebrand, also of the University of Calgary.
Cold and dry
). Some experts have said Mitchell could have sold the fragment for $400,000 but he opted to donate it to the University of Calgary.Return to “Astronomy and Geology”
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