Science

Seeing Speeding Space Chunks

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It appears that meteors of the sort that exploded in the air near Chelyabinsk in Russia are more common than scientists thought. The speeding rock caused a sensation when it streaked across the Russian sky last February, and the airborne blast created a concussion that broke windows. The bright light gave some people burned skin and the shock wave caused injuries on the ground.

Now some scientific analysis brings more information.

Most of the rock evaporated when it blew up 18.5 miles above Earth’s surface. Our atmosphere is 60 miles thick, or approximately the distance from St. Cloud to Minneapolis. So if the Chelyabinsk meteor were a metro area family returning home from a weekend up north at about 42,000 miles per hour (yes, that’s about how fast some of them drive), they made it to somewhere around Rogers before everything fell apart. That’s almost home by my reckoning.

Much of our worry has been focused on space rubble that’s more than a half-mile wide, but this lump was just 65 feet across. NASA is tracking more than 10,000 comets and asteroids though fewer than 1,500 have been classified as potentially hazardous to Earth. But the Chelyabinsk Chunk was made of a composite of gray and black stone, which reflects little light and is harder to spot. There may be more than 20 million asteroids with orbits that bring them close to Earth.

We can’t really protect ourselves against smaller space rocks. Gulp.

Where I once thought of space as cold, clean and empty, now I think of it as something like my basement, full of miscellaneous stuff I stopped thinking about.

Maybe rather than sending out movie-inspired space missions loaded with misfit deep-core drillers and explosives experts to destroy large threatening asteroids, we should launch misfit graffiti artists into orbit to paint the most threatening small debris so we can at least see it.

But this news, combined with our growing awareness of the long-term cost of concussions, will hasten the day when we all wear protective headgear most of the time, as both a fashion and safety statement.

Seriously.

Describe your everyday helmet – shape, color, decorations.

37 thoughts on “Seeing Speeding Space Chunks”

  1. Good morning. When i was still living in Indiana I knew a guy who designed a helmet to be worn to protect against the debris from a Russian space station that was breaking up and falling to earth. This guy was a hippy entrepreneur with a weird sense of humor. His creation was a cheap construction worker hard hat with a bulls eye painted on the top of it. He put them on display in a local bar where he offered them for sale. I think my helmet would be a copy of the one that guy in Indiana designed,

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    1. “a hippy entrepreneur with a weird sense of humor” – his name wasn’t tim, was it? (Sorry, couldn’t resist…)

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      1. His name was Dave. He was a member of the Hell’s Tunas motor cycle club which was included other hippies that had an unusual sense of humor. I think tim probably would have fitted in with the Tunas back in those days when i lived in Indiana.

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  2. I have two predominant hats. Both of the ‘outback’ style. A dark gray, wool felt one for winter. It is crushable, so I can compress it for storage in a coat sleeve, if called for, and it will go back into shape. My summer hat is off-white and has a mesh crown and a linen covering around the brim. I bought it from Coolibar, a local company that specializes in U/V resistant clothing, very good for those of us with an advanced forehead. I have some other hats but those are my favorites and my ‘everyday’ hats.

    Y’know, I just can’t think of the term ‘off-white’ without thinking of Ken Nordine and his ‘Colors’ album. For those of you that don’t know, Ken Nordine is a legend in the voiceover business with a set of pipes that just won’t quit. (Most people would recognize him from Levi’s ads in the early to mid-1980’s.) Back in the 1960’s, Nordine invented something called ‘word jazz.’ He would perform free-form poetry with a group of jazz musicians. He would feed off of their music and they would feed off of his poetry. It became marginally popular. Pittsburgh Paints contracted Nordine to do an album of short ‘word jazz’ bits about various colors and it was given away by Pittsburgh Paints stores as a promotion. It became a cult favorite. It was re-released a few years ago with additonal tracks that hadn’t been used on the album. I think the re-released CD is out of print again now. But some people have animated some of the tracks and put the videos on youtube. Here’s the one for white. It’s cool, man…

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    3. Thinking about Ken Nordine reminded me of the series of radio ads for Bud Light, “Real Men of Genius.” I thought maybe Ken had been the voice for those as well, but no. If you don’t remember the series or never heard them in the first place, they are worth searching out. Hilarious.
      http://budlight.whipnet.com

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  3. Teenager is suffering with a hat right now. The job she has landed at college involves either cashiering at the food market or making coffee drinks at “The Cabin”. Both of these assignments require a hat. She hates hats and always has. Even when she was a baby, she wouldn’t tolerate hats of any kind; she didn’t even like those stretchy headbands that people put on their babies. In the winter she might pull a scarf up to cover her ears, but she won’t wear a hat for anything.

    I don’t tend toward hats anymore either, but more because it’s just one more thing to keep track of!

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  4. My everyday helmet would have to protect not only from space objects but oilfield hazards. For the former I would want something light, unobtrusive, and comfortable, maybe in a nice burgundy. For oilfield issues, I would need a gas mask. You never know when driving around in the badlands when you will come across a sign warning about poison gas at well sites. They aren’t kidding. A young oil worker died a couple of weeks ago after being overcome by the gas, which I believe is sulfur dioxide. Maybe for Christmas I would switch to a helmet decorated with a nice Norwegian sweater pattern.

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      1. ill bet he doesnt care at all. how awful. my wifes dad dies in the early 60’s from farming without regard to the chemicals he was handling. no one thought about that stuff back in the old days. you would think we have come a ways since then. then you go talk to folks and realize that we havent really come to far.

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  5. My ideal everyday helmet is constructed with a base layer of Kevlar, of course, and layered with humility, a sense of humor, low expectations, high hopes, the joy of learning, an appreciation and respect for the natural world, with a super tough outer layer of carbon nano-fibers to repel all the bad things in the human world.

    Personally, if I’m going to die someday anyway, being killed by space debris wouldn’t be the worst way to go. I’d never know what hit me and I’d achieve my dream of being famous (just to see what it’s like, not that I have a big ego or anything, and mainly because I doubt I’ll ever see a book of mine on the NY Times bestsellers list), because everyone will forever remember the first guy in recorded history to be killed by junk falling from space.

    It’s a slightly modified version of George Carlin’s classic line, “I don’t wanna have a funeral like that. And I don’t wanna be cremated, either. I wanna be blown up! *BOOM!* “There he goes!! God Love Him!!””

    Chris in Owatonna

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  6. I kind of like that little ladybug helmet, Dale. I’d make mine a dragonfly, iridescent blue, though the gossamer wings might be problematic. Or a plastic bubble, not unlike the shape of that off white chair, in a nice turquoise. Loses something with the strap, though.

    In real life, I make sure my winter and rain coats have a hood, and that usually does it. I have one brimmed “lady” hat, burgundy, that I keep for costume parties… My mom, though, still has the classic opera headgear – Viking horns attached to the long blond braids – and a Roaring 20s headband (red sequins) with accompanying tall feather.

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  7. my helmet is a variable that i enjoy the choice of making on a daily basis. i got into hats at an early age . maybe it was my second or third christmas i wanted a cowboy hat. wore it everywhere. baseball caps in grade school were ok but i always preferred a fedora. a couple of years ago i started buying and selling hats on ebay and i was concerned for a while that it would spoil the specialness of hats for me but it doesnt. i love hats. cowboy, fedora, homburg panama derby skimmer porkpie openraod stratoliner playboy whippet 20x resistols and stetsons borsalinos and any mix of the old classics that are siomilar to all the old car companies. remember the movies in the 40’s and 5o’s where every man wore a hat? the hat companuies in those days were more local and the quality put out by the local guy making hats for a local market was superior to the chevy mentality they do today. mallory champ wormser knox dobbs along with the stetson and resistol and borsalino that you likely have heard of were the folks who would come to work each day knowing that if they didnt give you grat quality you would go elsewhere to get your next hat because it was something that was an everyday part of your life like your car or your shoes. today its target store fashion with bruno mars and miley cyrus hats that make the grade. ah the good old days. but if you want a helmet helmut to protect you from the crash on the motorcycle kind of protection. borsalino makes the most fashionable helmets in the industry for the fashion conscious riders or in this case planet walkers out there.

    http://tinyurl.com/kq3v6ug

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  8. o.t.
    for the bbc i am picking up a business person at the airport at 3 so i need to ask that if its at my house we either do it at 11 to be done by 230 or move it a week tot he 17th. the 17th would be my preferrence but last minute stuff may require going ahead this sunday. i will find a bbc email list and fire it off.

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  9. Last year, at age two, Liam went Trick or Treating for the first time. It didn’t take long for him to learn that this was a quest for candy. Because he became so fixed on the candy, my daughter tried to make Liam more polite by getting him to acknowledge the Halloween decorations before demanding his treat.

    As luck would have it, the very next house had no decorations at all. Liam rang the doorbell, closely followed by two young dads who were escorting their tiny spooks. The woman who came to the door was a stunning blonde in a slinky , low-cut black dress. When she bent to offer Liam a bowl of candy she almost spilled out of her dress.

    “Hey,” Liam sang out. “Great pumpkins!” The two dads got tangled up in each other as they ran down the sidewalk to a place they could crack up in the safety of darkness.

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  10. Couldn’t leave this one…. thinking of getting killed by space junk made me think about Northern Exposure. Of course, a helmet probably wouldn’t have helped Rick.

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  11. Like I said, people remember you if you die that way. Twenty years at least since Northern Exposure was on TV. 🙂
    He even saw the satellite coming, so maybe had a few seconds to say, “Oh, sh#t!” but even so, instantaneous death. 😉

    Chris

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    1. 20 years? Geez… I didn’t to realize that. Of course, I should have known… when I watched this clip, I thought “Gosh, Rob Morrow seems so young.”

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  14. My daily helmet is a blue bicycle helmet, although we are quickly approaching the 20 degree limit, after which the bicycle helmet is retired for the season and the colorful thin winter hat for walking appears.

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    1. I know of no baboons who live in that area, Renee, although if you were at Finn Bistro when you were in town recently, you were darn close. I don’t know why the Strib web site refers to that area as “southeast” – it looks more nordeast to me.

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  16. I would like one that is a lot more feminine than the ones shown. Let’s put some protective looking hair and perhaps a shiny headband also; then I might consider starting to wear one.

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