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It's extremely hard to discern but it looks like there was possibly another smaller piece that goes flying by just before the camera stabilizes and the main meteor comes into view.
I'm... skeptical. If you look at the frames of the meteorite falling, it looks like each frame has the fragment at about 3 feet from its last position. If that's a 60fps camera (I think it is?), that's 180 f/s speed or 122mph. That seems really slow for a rock flying into the atmosphere from space, and far slower than a rock would have to be going for it to "cut him in half." My guess: a rock that fell off the underc…
Agreed. When is the last time you saw a bullet videotaped on a normal camera? This is moving 10x faster than a bullet?
Is it me or does it look like the "meteorite" is moving quite slow. Shouldn't it be moving so fast that you'd need a high speed camera to see it in that detail? Also...his parachute is always above him, maybe it fell out of that.
Yeah, Occam's razor tells me that it's much more likely that a stone got stuck somewhere in their skydiving apparatus than having a meteorite fly right past you while you're skydiving. Maybe I'm underestimating the quantity of meteorites falling on the earth but since the newspapers aren't exactly filled with news of people getting killed by falling rocks I'm not yet ready to believe that was a meteorite.
Shouldn't we be expecting a rock that has just been heated to plasma stage by atmospheric friction only seconds earlier to be glowing, steaming or leaving little molten fragments of itself behind? Update: maybe not. The last stage of flight is "dark and cold" according to this: http://www.meteorite-recon.com/en/Meteorite_fusion_crust_1.h...
Shouldn't we be expecting a rock that has just been heated to plasma stage by atmospheric friction only seconds earlier to be glowing, steaming or leaving little molten fragments of itself behind? Update: maybe not. The last stage of flight is "dark and cold" according to this: http://www.meteorite-recon.com/en/Meteorite_fusion_crust_1.h...
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_reentry#Blunt_body_... (admittedly about spacecraft rather than meteorites):
"Through making the reentry vehicle blunt, air cannot 'get out of the way' quickly enough, and acts as an air cushion to push the shock wave and heated shock layer forward (away from the vehicle). Since most of the hot gases are no longer in direct contact with the vehicle, the heat energy would stay in the shocked gas and simply move around the vehicle to later dissipate into the atmosphere."
I'm... skeptical. If you look at the frames of the meteorite falling, it looks like each frame has the fragment at about 3 feet from its last position. If that's a 60fps camera (I think it is?), that's 180 f/s speed or 122mph. That seems really slow for a rock flying into the atmosphere from space, and far slower than a rock would have to be going for it to "cut him in half." My guess: a rock that fell off the underc…
> If that's a 60fps camera (I think it is?) ... The camera appears to be recording at a rate of about 10 frames per second. This is a way to reduce memory consumption in a portable device in which recording duration has a higher priority than recording frame rate. AT 10 FPS, the rock's sequential positions seem consistent with a falling rock. And, lo and behold: http://gopro.com/cameras/hd-hero3-silver-edition Quote:…
I'm... skeptical. If you look at the frames of the meteorite falling, it looks like each frame has the fragment at about 3 feet from its last position. If that's a 60fps camera (I think it is?), that's 180 f/s speed or 122mph. That seems really slow for a rock flying into the atmosphere from space, and far slower than a rock would have to be going for it to "cut him in half." My guess: a rock that fell off the underc…
> If that's a 60fps camera (I think it is?) ... The camera appears to be recording at a rate of about 10 frames per second. This is a way to reduce memory consumption in a portable device in which recording duration has a higher priority than recording frame rate. AT 10 FPS, the rock's sequential positions seem consistent with a falling rock. And, lo and behold: http://gopro.com/cameras/hd-hero3-silver-edition Quote:…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be under an assumption that the distribution of planes around the globe is even. Given most jetliners are flying in corridors, I would say the actual probability is much much lower. The same can be probably said about meteorites - I guess their geographic distribution is uneven as well.
As others have said: the distribution of the planes over the Earth (and their speed -- one Yahoo site I ran across suggested they're harder to hit because they're moving fast -- that's also irrelevant, not to mention that pretty much everything on Earth is moving at about 20km/s relative to an asteroid) doesn't matter. Because meteorites aren't aimed. Odds are they'll land pretty much anywhere on the planet. I'm not…
Indeed, it's not as if they're trying to dodge.
However, doesn't a faster plane actually have a higher probability of intersecting the same space as a falling rock?
Comparable to: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4562132.stm ('...So running fast actually makes us wetter according to this analysis')
They keep talking about how lucky he is it missed him, but I almost think the opposite is true: He'd have to have been staggeringly un lucky to have been hit by it.
In fact, he was doubly lucky. Firstly, he was incredibly lucky to have witnessed a meteorite passing a few meters from him. Secondly, he was very lucky not to be killed by the meteorite that was passing a few meters from him.
I'm... skeptical. If you look at the frames of the meteorite falling, it looks like each frame has the fragment at about 3 feet from its last position. If that's a 60fps camera (I think it is?), that's 180 f/s speed or 122mph. That seems really slow for a rock flying into the atmosphere from space, and far slower than a rock would have to be going for it to "cut him in half." My guess: a rock that fell off the underc…
I am very skeptical. Although quite stupid, it wouldn't be hard for the other guy to have thrown some kind of junk and get it on camera, then claim it was a meteorite. I bet nobody ever finds any evidence of said "space rock".
HN skeptics. The shit they say, I swear.