Meteorite fall and the close fly-by of Asteroid DA14 - A coincidence?
Visit the following links to read reports of a
meteorite fall in Russia on 15 Feb 2013, the same day that Asteroid DA14 will
make a clos fly-by. Are they connected?
The BBC report (the second link above) quotes Prof Alan Fitzsimmons, of the
Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast, as saying that the
flyby and the meteorite fall are unlikely to be connected. DA14 is expected to approach
us from the South, while the meteorite that hit Russia has hit the Northern
Hemisphere of the earth.
Another
interesting source of information is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere
This one talks
about the fact that an astronaut cannot be in stable orbit around the Space Shuttle
– the earth will disturb his orbit and he could end up orbiting the earth
instead of orbiting the shuttle. Such considerations are relevant to
visualizing material loosely attached to an asteroid doing a close flyby hitting
the earth’s atmosphere.
Srinivasan
Ramani
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