Optimus, Is That You?

It’s 11:30 Pacific Time on a beautiful Friday morning and asteroid 2012 DU14 just passed by the earth without incident. DU14 actually passed closer than some of our weather satellites, just over 17,000 miles above the earth’s surface. NASA was livestreaming video from Australia: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html.

The far bigger news, though, is the meteorite that hurt hundreds of people in Russia. This unexpected visitor from outer space– ironically arriving hours before the unrelated asteroid– had such a powerful shock wave that it blew out windows, blew open doors, set off alarms, and even knocked down a wall in a factory.

The video of the fireball is like something out of a Transformers movie except better. See http://say26.com/meteorite-in-russia-all-videos-in-one-place and http://zyalt.livejournal.com/722930.html for photos and videos, links posted on Spaceweather.com’s coverage of this event (http://www.spaceweather.com/). Even the sound of the shockwave, something you can observe at the first link, seems unearthly.

Some in Russia thought it was the end of the world and I can’t blame them. Here we are at the end of the workweek expecting a quiet, harmless space mass to do a fly-by when this other monster shows up. A meteorite doesn’t have to be that large to be noticed, but this blazing mass of space junk is the meteorite heard ’round the world thanks to technology.

A friend and I were emailing about the meteorite and he had the same thought I did when he first heard about it– is it the Autobots?

Optimus Prime, is that you? 

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Here’s the original movie scene:

Discovery.com has a thermal image of the explosion from a satellite: http://news.discovery.com/space/asteroids-meteors-meteorites/satellite-sees-meteor-explosion-from-space-130215.htm.

Here’s a more serious take on the Autobots in a previous post: https://wildninja.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/angels-and-autobots/.

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