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Debunked:
Not to be taken seriously. The first thing I noticed was a schoolboy blunder in celestial mechanics: you don’t add velocities in the way that he did, you add energies, that’s to say the squares of the velocities. If an asteroid with an asymptotic approach speed of 5.6 km/s is going to hit Earth its impact speed (prior to air resistance) would be 12.5 km/s, not 17 km/s. We can therefore safely ignore the rest of his story. — Noted Astronomer
Straight from Andrew Cooper, “Scute,” at Talk Bloke. Fascinating information and speculation — but darn it I hate to see the Tusk scooped in this regard.
Fortunately, when it comes to orbital calculations and intuitive dynamic visualizations of the solar system the Tusk is more than its author. Can any readers analyze and verify the claims made by the Scute at Tall Bloke?
Hat Tip: Phil Clapham at the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies
Excerpt:
I will acknowledge that when NASA said that the Chebarkul meteor was not following along the same path as 2012DA14 they were right but only in a highly technical sense. Any fragment passing within a radius of a few thousand miles of the trajectory would not have impacted the other side of the Earth. But when considering the possibility of meteor showers, you have to think in terms of millions of miles, even for asteroidal showers such as the Geminids and the Quarantids, because the Earth takes days to travel through them. I think NASA was clutching at straws. You have to look at the bigger picture and besides, the proposition as put forward in this comment isn’t played out on a vast scale in solar system terms. – Andrew Copper at talk bloke
The Chelyabinsk Meteor and a possible link with 2012DA14
I think the idea of the Russian meteor being related to 2012DA14 should be resurrected. I say resurrected because the idea was so roundly slapped down by NASA within hours of the impact and never discussed again. Most of the information below was gleaned from NASA’s own JPL Horizons ephemeris for 2012DA14.
Let me begin by addressing a few myths that seemed to sew it up regarding the lack of any link between the two
Firstly, the direction of approach was not on the night side of the earth but on the day side (2012DA14 flipped under and up round the back only in the last 5 hours) and the radiant was not, as variously described, “the South Pole” or -81 degrees (implied by the above as being -81 to the night side), but at -69 degrees on the sunward side.
Secondly, the radiant had a right ascension of almost exactly 00 hours ,that is, 30 degrees east of the sun (which was at 21 hours 54 min of RA on the day) in the equatorial plane. The Russian (Chebarkul) meteor came in at 13 degrees east of the sun in local horizontal coordinates.
Thirdly, the incoming trajectory of the meteor was not north-south but on an azimuth of 99 degrees i.e. 9 degrees south of east. Since it was sunrise this meant that the meteor came from a direction close to the sun (13 degrees east of it), in other words, coming in over a great circle running down the globe to the south, although a better approximation would be south east, This was possible because the Earth’s axis was tilted back by 12.5 on that date, making a late sunrise for Chebarkul, so watching the sunrise on a somewhat tighter, northern latitude line meant looking along a straight line that soon scribed south eastwards in lower latitudes (rather than curving round the 55 degree North line).
Fourthly, 2012DA14 was not going “too slow” for a related fragment to arrive at 17km/second: its radiant, relative velocity to the Earth before being accelerated was 12600mph. That is 5.6 km/ sec. If you add to that the freefall velocity of 11.2 km/sec (the corollary of escape velocity) you get 16.8 km/sec. Add to that the eastward rotation of the earth at 55degrees north at an Azimuth of 9 degrees south of east (0.2 km/sec) you arrive at precisely 17km/sec. This is the same calculation that Zuluaga and Ferrin (and now, NASA) must have done in reverse for their version of the reconstruction of the trajectory: I calculated the radial speed of their hypothesised orbits at the Earth’s position (r value/ radius from sun=1AU) on the day of impact (but without the Earth’s gravitational influence added) and ended up with 34.8 and 35.2 km/sec for the 2 posited orbits. That amounts to 5 and 5.4 km/sec relative to the Earth, respectively. Adding the freefall velocity and the eastward rotation you get 16.4 and 16.8km/sec. The difference between these posited orbits and the posited 2012DA14 fragment is that they invoke the head-on trajectory solution with little or no curvature as they are pulled into the gravity well. If it’s a bulls-eye hit the curvature is zero. The Zuluaga and Ferrin video shows the meteor coming in from about 3 degrees above the solar plane. The NASA video now shows the same.
Continue reading Linked?: Andrew Cooper on Feb 15 Asteroid and Russian Meteor
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