Scientists find meteor debris in Canada
November 29th, 2008
University of Calgary graduate student Ellen Milley poses with a fragment of a meteorite in a small pond near Lloydminster, Sask., Canada Friday, Nov. 28, 2008. Scientists said Friday they had found remains of a meteor that illuminated the sky before falling to earth in western Canada earlier this month. University of Calgary scientist Alan Hildebrand and Milley found several meteor fragments near the Battle River along the rural Alberta-Saskatchewan border, near the city of Lloydminster late Thursday. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Geoff Howe)
(AP) -- Scientists said Friday they had found remains of a meteor that illuminated the sky before falling to earth in western Canada earlier this month.
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id like to see someone do a kiloton graph of kilotons of tnt energy being a function of a meteors speed x and weight y.
The difference in speeds between the two objects is of course of far greater concern than mass (because velocity is squared), but impact speeds have a fairly narrow range, and the total energy difference caused by speed only varies by maybe a factor of 16 (I'm thinking 10km/s to 40km/s).
Of course a factor of 16 sounds like a lot, and it is, but the point is that any given meteor, no matter its mass, will probably fall somewhere inside that speed range.
Since velocity is relatively constant across the whole range of meteors, you can safely ignore that for a rough graph, and only concern yourself with mass. Well, mass increases linearly in that equation, so your graph of impact energy will be a straight line, where impact energy is directly proportionate to the mass of the meteor.
A 10 kilogram object will release 10 times more energy than a 1 kilogram object, a 100 kilogram object will release 100 times more energy than a 1 kilogram object, and so on.