– Meteorite at Curuca

These days they are talking about intercepting the meteorites by sending some satellites that can use the natural gravitation attraction between bodies to push the meteorite off its path!

In 1908 a meteorite exploded over Siberia’s barely populated Tunguska River region with a destructive force of 10 to 50 megatons of TNT. It flattened forests and killed reindeer herds, but only a few people died. It took years to diagnose what’d happened. Once we knew, we shrugged it off as too rare to worry about, even though that same explosion over a big city could kill ten million people.

Now a disturbing incident comes to light. In 1930, inhabitants along the Curuça River in Western Brazil near Peru saw a blood-red sky and a rain of red dust followed by an eerie whistling sound and fireballs in the sky. Another meteorite in a remote place! This explosion was only 1/10 as powerful as the Tunguska explosion. Yet that’s still 50 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.

A Jesuit missionary arrived five days later. He talked with locals, who were still terribly alarmed. He told their story, seven months after the fact, in a Vatican newspaper.

We’ve only recently diagnosed the Curuça event. It was probably a cluster of three meteorites. That’s why dust from the first impact was seen before the other two landed.

There’s a grim message here. We once thought the Tunguska Meteorite was a once-in-300-years event. But Curuça was only 22 years later. Within our solar system, and just outside it, some ten trillion meteorites, comets, and asteroids move in their shaky orbits. Cosmic junk reaches us all the time.

The Tunguska meteor was 90 feet across. The meteorite that we believe killed off the dinosaurs and 3/4 of Earth’s living creatures, 65 million years ago, had to’ve been around 10 miles in diameter. That one completely altered the Earth.

Today, astronomers are building complete records of orbiting objects. By the year 2008, they hope to know just what’s headed our way. Then the question will be, “How much warning do we have?” Five years is too little. The closer the object is, the harder it’ll be to deflect its orbit. Fifty years warning should give us time to launch an explosive device that could deflect a small asteroid. Of course anything as little as the Tunguska or Curuça meteorite will be very hard to locate in time to intercept.

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