Near certain hit at Oct 07 0246 UTC! - Page 2

Kullat Nunu · #31 (**permalink**) 07-October-2008, 12:19 PM

The crew of a KML flight may have seen saw a bright meteor in the direction of the calculated entry point approximately in the right time. Unfortunately, the plane was quite far (750 nautical miles) from the place so the event was not very impressive (satellite image of the locations of the plane and the predicted atmospheric entry point).

zenbudda · #32 (**permalink**) 07-October-2008, 03:57 PM

gah, i'm dying to see the video or at least some pics. anyone have any luck locating any yet? i stayed up late hoping some of the vid sites would have something posted.

Kullat Nunu · #33 (**permalink**) 07-October-2008, 06:24 PM

Image of 2008 TC3 entering into Earth's shadow hour before the impact.

Kullat Nunu · #34 (**permalink**) 07-October-2008, 06:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zenbudda

gah, i'm dying to see the video or at least some pics. anyone have any luck locating any yet? i stayed up late hoping some of the vid sites would have something posted.

The atmospheric entry location is a remote region of northern Sudan. I would be positively surprised if somebody got video or even photos. On the other hand, objects of this size hit the Earth monthly, so the best bolide videos are probably much more dramatic than 2008 TC3's end.

mahesh · #35 (**permalink**) 07-October-2008, 08:02 PM

It came from Outer Space!

Thank you Kullat Nunu and 01101001, for your great efforts and sharing all this info.
Brilliant stuff!

i wonder if there would be any photographs/videos and wonder where ISS was around 0246 gmt...at a safe distance i hope.
i can track its trajectory in real time, but would like to go back to about 0246 gmt...don't know how. is it possible, at all?

slang · #36 (**permalink**) 07-October-2008, 09:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kullat Nunu

Image of 2008 TC3 entering into Earth's shadow hour before the impact.

Heh.. that sounds very ominous. As if it engages stealth-mode just before it hits. (BTW I think you meant to type KLM in #31)

01101001 · #37 (**permalink**) 07-October-2008, 11:29 PM

Planetary Society Weblog: The full story of Earth-impacting asteroid 2008 TC3

Quote:

To briefly review: the night before last (my time), or at 06:38 UTC on October 6, astronomers at the University of Arizona discovered an object provisionally called 8TA9D69 that appeared to be on a collision course with Earth. Three other observatories reported sightings within the next few hours -- Sabino Canyon and Siding Spring in Arizona and a Royal Astronomical Society site in Moorook, Australia. Together these four observers provided enough data on the object so that a Minor Planet Electronic Circular was issued at 14:59 UTC the same day, giving 8TA9D69 the more formal name 2008 TC3, and advising the astronomical community that "The nominal orbit given above has 2008 TC3 coming to within one earth radius around Oct. 7.1. The absolute magnitude indicates that the object will not survive passage through the atmosphere. Steve Chesley (JPL) reports that atmospheric entry will occur on 2008 Oct 07 0246 UTC over northern Sudan."
[...]
As yet there are no confirmed images of the fireball -- it's possible there may never be any. There is one possible sighting: one resourceful enthusiast, Jacob Kuiper, the General Aviation meteorologist at the National Weather Service in the Netherlands, called an official of the Air-France-KLM airline at the Amsterdam airport to inform him "about the possibility that crews of their airliners in the vicinity of impact would have a chance to see a fireball. And it was a success!
[...]

And for those who enjoy worrying:

Quote:

But of course we now have to ask ourselves: what would have happened if the object was much bigger than 2 meters in diameter? Reassuringly, the first thing that would have happened is that the detection most likely would have happened much earlier. The bigger and more hazardous an object is, the brighter it is, and the sooner we will detect it. We will likely have way more than 20 hours' warning of an incoming dangerous object. Still, though, the warning time for a tens-of-meter-diameter object could only be measured in days. If we'd had three days' warning of a dangerous impactor heading for Sudan, what could the world have done?

Same as hurricane/cyclone/typhoon warnings, no? Do our best to help move those affected.

Kullat Nunu · #38 (**permalink**) 08-October-2008, 06:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by slang

Heh.. that sounds very ominous. As if it engages stealth-mode just before it hits. (BTW I think you meant to type KLM in #31)

Oops, right.

Kullat Nunu · #39 (**permalink**) 08-October-2008, 07:42 AM

Impact confirmed infrasonically.

Quote:

Confirmation has been received that the asteroid impact fireball occurred at the predicted time and place. The energy recorded was estimated to be 0.9 to 1.0 kT of TNT and the time of detection was 02:45:45 on October 7 (Greenwich Standard Time). More details on this detection will be forthcoming. An additional confirmation was apparently reported by a KLM airliner (see: http://www.spaceweather.com/). As reported by Peter Brown (University of Western Ontario, Canada), a preliminary examination of infrasound stations nearest to the predicted impact point shows that at least one station recorded the event. These measurements are consistent with the predicted time and place of the atmospheric impact and indicate an estimated energy of 1.1 - 2.1 kT of TNT.

For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb was 13 kt. Tunguska event was 5-30 Mt.

hewhocaves · #40 (**permalink**) 08-October-2008, 05:14 PM

So I just checked this thread after reading (for amusement purposes) the conspiracy thread about the 'UFO' around the Chinese launch. And here is something that I think is excellently illustrated.

With the bolide we had time and place a day before the impact and thus far photographs have been few and far between - just one or two from telescopes before it hit the atmosphere. Statistically speaking, knowing the particulars beforehand, you would expect that someone would have had a decent camera pointed upward.

And yet we have all this UFO video / still images / anecdotal evidence. Which either means that (a) UFOs are so frequent, we have the worst space lane traffic this side of Coruscant or (b) its 99.99999999999999% garbage.

I don't think we're Coruscant. I'd have noticed the lightsabres by now.

Just an observation.

01101001 · #41 (**permalink**) 08-October-2008, 05:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hewhocaves

With the bolide we had time and place a day before the impact and thus far photographs have been few and far between - just one or two from telescopes before it hit the atmosphere.

I think there were lots of inbound images, but maybe not all published or found on the Web. I recall reading that the orbit was easy to calculate because of the many observations -- and, unlike most more distant asteroid discoveries, the fact that it was so close to Earth meant there was great parallax difference in observations from different places.

Sky and Telescope: Major Meteor on Oct. 6-7 Was Forecast in Advance

It reports southern Europeans tried and failed.

Quote:

More intriguing is a negative report from Khartoum received by Johnny Horne of the Fayetteville Observer. Khartoum and Mecca are the closest significant cities to the impact site, but each is still roughly 300 miles away. This part of the world is exceedingly arid and sparsely populated!

Blog comment from Khartoum:

Quote:

Hi , in response to the predicted asteroid over Sudan a colleague and I got up on our roof top in Khartoum Sudan from 02:35- 03:00 UTC and scanned the skies for it and never got to see it. Are there any confirmed sightings of it and where abouts?.. Pity we couldnt film it for you guys…

Maybe some northern Sudan desert nomad's got it on his cellphone and just hasn't uploaded it yet.

But, I'm surprised we haven't seen images from Khartoum. For instance, the University of Khartoum (Wikipedia) has near 17000 students, some in science and engineering (no astronomy department, but astronomy courses). Too far away?

Kullat Nunu · #42 (**permalink**) 08-October-2008, 08:35 PM

The impact was seen by Meteosat 8. Here's the image. Pretty much exactly where it was supposed to be.

01101001 · #43 (**permalink**) 08-October-2008, 11:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 01101001

I think there were lots of inbound images, but maybe not all published or found on the Web.

Diagram: 2008 TC3 Parallax - all 566 published observations from easysky.de.

Kullat Nunu · #44 (**permalink**) 10-October-2008, 01:21 PM

8TAF2C5 makes a near miss at 12750 +/- 300 km. If the measured absolute magnitude is correct (H = 33.2), it would be the smallest detected ~~asteroid~~ pebble detected, smaller 2008 TC3.

01101001 · #45 (**permalink**) 10-October-2008, 05:43 PM

Planetary Society Weblog: Images of the 2008 TC3 fireball from space!

Nothing not already mentioned here, I think, but with more analysis.

Quote:

It seems that no one in Sudan was able to record the 2008 TC3 fireball; the only image I've seen that was shot from the ground was one very tiny pixel in the sky seen from a beach in Egypt. But in this day and age, there are always eyes in the sky on practically every point on Earth, and, through good fortune, the METEOSAT-8 spacecraft scanned the globe at the moment that the asteroid was putting on its show.

Kullat Nunu · #46 (**permalink**) 08-November-2008, 07:00 AM

Today's APOD picture features the persistent train of 2008 TC3 fireball. It must have been an awesome sight.

publiusr · #47 (**permalink**) 16-January-2009, 08:40 PM

The report from a month after the event.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/2008tc3.html
"The data are consistent with the predicted arrival direction and time and suggest a kinetic energy of about 1.1 - 2.1 kilotons of TNT. "

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