Moved this away from the "distant voices" theremin thread..
"No one mentioned the meteorite strike in Russia, and the near miss fly by all in the same day? Now them is some "extremely" long odds, could something else be going on? Did someone lose a missile?" - RS
I agree about the "long odds" - But if there has been a "cover up" I think this may be more to do with prevention of panic than anything more sinister.
With a major meteor strike, and an large object still getting closer to earth, If the possible (likely) linkage of these had not been weakened then I think a lot of people might have been worried.
To me, it seems inevitable that there was some "linkage" - The gravitational fields exerted by the asteroid will probably have influenced the trajectory of the object which impacted Russia, even if this object did not originate from the asteroid.
I also think it possible that an object as large as the asteroid could have debris orbiting it, even if only temporarily.
We will probably never know - it may just have been coincidence, but unless it can be determined from the trajectory of the incoming meteorite that this was related to the asteroid, we will never be sure.
It was a most peculiar meteor strike though - but not unique.. In SA in the 70's there was a strange event - thousands of people saw a bright object fall to earth, and this was followed by an tremor which felt more like a massive underground explosion (it knocked me off my feet) .. But the incident was put down to a low grade earth tremor and all the sightings written off as reflections or Venus or imagination or whatever (I cannot remember the official story, but it was laughable).
Of course, you may be right.. There may have been some missiles fired up to bump that big rock away from our expensive satellites, or someone may have thought they could grab a chunk of it with a probe as it passed bye, or whatever, and things didnt go to plan... But I would be surprised (to say the least! ;-)
Imagine the panic if this had happened in say December last year, as we were all preparing for the Mayan "end of the world" LOL ;-)
Then I find this: (Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/feb/15/meteorite-explodes-over-russian-urals-live-updates )
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, long-term leader of Russia's far right parliamentary bloc, claimed the meteor was not a cosmic event but something more sinister, my colleague Mark Rice-Oxley reports. Zhirinovsky said:
It is not meteors falling, it's the Americans testing a new weapon. [Secretary of state John] Kerry warned [foreign minister Sergei] Lavrov on Monday ... that there would be such a provocation and that it might affect Russia.
Professor Ian Crawford of Birkbeck University was just interviewed about the meteorites on Sky News.
He said it was too early to tell if this incident was connected to the asteroid passing by the earth tonight.
He pointed out that if these meteorites were travelling with the asteroid, they would be many hours ahead of it.
But he said there was so much video footage coming out of Russia that it would be "possible to reconstruct the orbit" and work out if the meteorite and asteroid 2012 DA14 were connected. But, he concluded: "Probably not."
Update: February 15, 2013 7pm PST
New information provided by a worldwide network of sensors has allowed scientists to refine their estimates for the size of the object that entered that atmosphere and disintegrated in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia, at 7:20:26 p.m. PST, or 10:20:26 p.m. EST on Feb. 14 (3:20:26 UTC on Feb. 15).
The estimated size of the object, prior to entering Earth's atmosphere, has been revised upward from 49 feet (15 meters) to 55 feet (17 meters), and its estimated mass has increased from 7,000 to 10,000 tons. Also, the estimate for energy released during the event has increased by 30 kilotons to nearly 500 kilotons of energy released. These new estimates were generated using new data that had been collected by five additional infrasound stations located around the world – the first recording of the event being in Alaska, over 6,500 kilometers away from Chelyabinsk. The infrasound data indicates that the event, from atmospheric entry to the meteor's airborne disintegration took 32.5 seconds. The calculations using the infrasound data were performed by Peter Brown at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average," said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones."
The trajectory of the Russia meteor was significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, which hours later made its flyby of Earth, making it a completely unrelated object. The Russia meteor is the largest reported since 1908, when a meteor hit Tunguska, Siberia.Hmmm - 10k Tons, and nobody knew it was coming.. Ok, DA14 was 190k Tons, so a fair bit bigger - but still... if that 10k tons had impacted an area with dense population...
