It kind of makes me wonder if my intuition about how rare meteorites are is a bit off; for one meteorite to almost hit a person, there must be many more meteorites that weren't noticed, or were never found.
> An estimated 500 meteorites reach the surface each year, but only 5 or 6 of these typically create a weather radar signature with a strewn field large enough to be recovered and be made known to scientists.
I wonder if there are places on the sea floor with piles of these things that have accumulated over the years and for whatever reason not been buried in sediment? I suppose iron meteorites would probably rust and disintegrate; maybe some of other materials might survive.
There’s a wonderful passage in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry‘s memoir “Wind, Sand, and Stars” where he describes being marooned in the saharan (or is it Arabian) desert, and didn’t think much of the many small black stones speckled in the sand until night fell and he saw the steady stream of meteors falling from the sky. (If you’re in a truly dark environment, like a desert in the early days of electric light, there doesn’t even have to be a meteor shower to see a fireball every few minutes)
The description in the book elicits a sense of one-ness, that earth is not separate from the space it inhabits, but very much interacts with all the other flying rocks.
He has a companion video about that - apparently that particular SEM is the smallest in the world, and the manufacturer loaned him one to make videos about. But he had a ton of issues with it due to being at a high altitude.
How could high altitude negatively affect the machine? The machine uses a vacuum pump. High altitude should help the vacuum pump work faster and better.
Yes the probability of hitting a house is low. To begin with assuming uniform sampling over the planet (asterisk here) hitting land is lower than hitting an ocean / large water body.
The asterisk here is that from my knowledge asteroid belts in the system are almost co-planar to Earth so even accounting for dispersion my expectation is that the dostribution to the Earth surface hits is not quite uniform.
I used to be skeptical of the idea there were any meteorites of martian origin on earth but it turns out there is copious mass exchange between planets.
Note that people routinely find meteorites just hanging out on the surface in areas like Antarctica
Reminds me of Ringworld by Larry Niven. Early in the book, the notoriously paranoid alien is outside and stressed about the odds of being hit by a meteorite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event#Frequency_and_ris...
> An estimated 500 meteorites reach the surface each year, but only 5 or 6 of these typically create a weather radar signature with a strewn field large enough to be recovered and be made known to scientists.
I wonder if there are places on the sea floor with piles of these things that have accumulated over the years and for whatever reason not been buried in sediment? I suppose iron meteorites would probably rust and disintegrate; maybe some of other materials might survive.