Feb 15 Meteorite(s) hit Russia - Analysis

[viscount aero]

1. entry and gradual brightening
2. a sudden massive brightening: explosion #1
3. a slight but noticeable dimming then another super brightening pulse: explosion #2
4. sudden dimming and then reveal of the emerging vapor trail structure once hidden by the luminous explosions
5. 2 distinct areas of bulging in the vapor trail structure, remains of explosion #1 and #2
6. lingering massive bulge area from explosion #1, billowing aerial fire
7. a small but observable glowing tip (#3--what remains of the main projectile) is leading away from and ahead of the lingering vapor and smoke plume
8. remaning double columnar vapor trail with highly discernible pinched section that demarcates the events of explosion 1 and 2

There were three distinct flashes, be it small the third , between #4 and #7,....

Good eye. I'll add it when I revise the presentation. Thanks.

[CharlesChandler]

May I suggest that we use the dash cam's time-stamp to identify the time of the events? (Or we could use the time from the beginning of the video.) That way, we'll all know exactly which frame we're talking about, when we refer to events.

Also, I'm trying to correlate the video with still images. I "think" that the step-down in the twin trails corresponds to the brightest flare, which occurred at 31:02 dash-cam-time-stamp. Do you agree?

The still images, taken seconds/minutes after the bolide had passed, seem to show some evaporation of the trails. So in the image above, does the beginning of the trail correspond to the first large brightening?

[Sparky]

The resting field between the Earth's surface and the ionosphere is not what determines whether or not the bolide will flash. Rather, the field between the bolide and the Earth is what's important.

Thanks, Charles.....you do for me what I can't do for myself.

It has been suggested at TB that a plasma trail would tend to connect the ionosphere with bodies entering Earth's stratosphere, by arc discharge. That's what i was going by. Plus my AGENDA to make circuits for everything...

BTW, how fast must a charged particle be moving, in relation to what, for electric current/magnetic field.?

How much of our local environment is composed of dark discharge plasma.

*********************************************
**************************************
viscount aero, I focused on the vertical discharges that appeared to connect the ground "fog" with the descending "fog". I was looking at these as glow discharges. The narrow vertical discharge, which has been described as a windshield anomaly, is interesting to me. A windshield anomaly may only explain part of that phenomenon. To me it looks like a glow discharge degrading into a dark discharge, later expanding to a bright glow/corona discharge.

I find it very interesting that the ground "fog" rose to meet the descending the glow from the bolide!

Remember, we did not see the first physical manifestation of the meteor in our atmosphere! What sparks, arcs, flashes, and glows were there when the meteor first connected with the Earth's charge?


*************************************
******************************
just curious:

I personally prefer to get a better handle on the basics. I have some very basic knowledge of electricity, I got my EE degree over 15 years ago, never practised in the field. So I have some re-learning to do there, plus all the plasma stuff, plus a lot more. But the one most important thing, whatever I do propose in a confident manner should at least be based on sound logic and reason.
What is your background Charles?

Sam, that is irrelevant! A logical fallacy! Implying an appeal to authority. At the level we are arguing, that is without good data as evidence, what a person's degreed in makes little difference, as there is disagreement between the experts, and especially in EU, a multidisciplinarian endeavour.

And my basic understanding of electricity, as I was taught, is quite a bit different than yours, as you were taught.


*************
*********

check out how the flashes start and stop with the Cuban meteor:
http://youtu.be/gGJsv1WYXEM

[viscount aero]

May I suggest that we use the dash cam's time-stamp to identify the time of the events? (Or we could use the time from the beginning of the video.) That way, we'll all know exactly which frame we're talking about, when we refer to events.

The various dash cams all of have different times on them.

Also, I'm trying to correlate the video with still images. I "think" that the step-down in the twin trails corresponds to the brightest flare, which occurred at 31:02 dash-cam-time-stamp. Do you agree?

Yes that is indicated in my page notes with the screen grabs. I called the demarcation events #1 and #2 (although there was apparently a 3rd flareup but only very slightly brief).

The still images, taken seconds/minutes after the bolide had passed, seem to show some evaporation of the trails. So in the image above, does the beginning of the trail correspond to the first large brightening?

I'll say yes on that. The first large brightening, #1, the one where it suddenly surges in magnitude, corresponds to the first bulge and to the end of the "fat part" of the vapor trail, ie, where the pinch happens. There is then a pause (which may be indicated by the pinched section) and then another bright flare up occurs, #2---the brightest one.

[viscount aero]

If it helps, look at my notes again:
http://www.stage32.com/profile/75224/ph ... 8048537185

Look particularly at frame 7, 8 and 9.

[CharlesChandler]

It has been suggested at TB that a plasma trail would tend to connect the ionosphere with bodies entering Earth's stratosphere, by arc discharge.

Oh OK, I gotcha. That is possible, but it would help if the plasma trail was vertical instead of nearly horizontal.

Plasma is a better conductor than gas. So if you have a plasma trail in a pre-existing electric field in a gas, you essentially have just inserted a wire into the gas. This "wire" can then carry a current that the gas wouldn't. So suppose you have a bolide approaching the Earth perpendicular to the surface. In addition to the fireball just from the bolide, you might also get a discharge in the ionosphere~to-surface electric field. Dave Smith made a good case (IMO) for megalightning striking the Columbia Shuttle, where the plasma trail provided the conductor that attracted the discharge. The same thing is crucial in the propagation of a lightning strike in a thunderstorm. The strike starts with a small flash, 100 meters long or so. That should be the end of it, but then there's this superheated plasma channel, 100 meters long, sitting there. Other charge disparities see that plasma channel as a conductor, and they head for it. When the get into the channel and arc to their destination, they re-heat the channel, and extend it. The longer channel is a longer wire that draws a third discharge, from charge disparities even further apart. In this way, the discharge channel grows at its ends until it's several or many kilometers long. This is all due to the conductivity of the plasma.

But this is only relevant to the extent that the plasma channel is parallel to the electric field (i.e., vertical in this case). If you inject a wire into an electric field, perpendicular to the field, it isn't going to carry any current, because there's no voltage drop from one end of the wire to the other.

So what was the angle of the Chelyabinsk meteor? It definitely wasn't perfectly horizontal. So there "might" be something to this.

BTW, how fast must a charged particle be moving, in relation to what, for electric current/magnetic field?

Any movement at all of charged particles will generate a magnetic field. The average drift velocity of electrons that drives electric motors is a couple of inches per hour, relative to the stationary magnets. But when comparing electric and magnetic forces, the drift velocity has to be relativistic (i.e., some substantial percentage of the speed of light) for the magnetic force to modulate the drift vector. So in that current-carrying wire going through the motor, the dominant force is the voltage from one end of the wire to the other. The magnetic pressure driving the motor doesn't alter the path of the electrons much.

How much of our local environment is composed of dark discharge plasma.

I don't know, but this reminded me of something that was reported at Chelyabinsk, and which is worth noting. I read somewhere that people said that the air smelled like gunpowder. Obviously, they weren't smelling anything from the "explosions". Rather, they were smelling the effects of ionization. Ozone is generally the first by-product around high voltages, but because it is so highly reactive, it doesn't last long, and then you get all kinds of other chemicals (e.g., HO, SO2, etc.) where the ozone leached elements out of compounds exposed to the ionized air. The ionization could have been just from the charge on the bolide (which I don't consider to be likely, since I think that the bolide/coma was net neutral), or more likely, it was from the EMP generated by the break-up.

check out how the flashes start and stop with the Cuban meteor...

This is very interesting! Correct me if I'm wrong, but now we have videos of two meteors that were sputtering, and before, we had none, is that correct?

The various dash cams all of have different times on them.

I was thinking that we were all going by the same video (i.e., the guy whose cam tracked the bolide perfectly as he took the right turn). Should we come up with names for these videos, to distinguish between them? Anyway, I agree that we should get all of this synchronized with the audio as well, so we can map the sounds to the flashes that produced them.

[Sparky]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but now we have videos of two meteors that were sputtering, and before, we had none, is that correct?

Which two are sputtering? Do you consider the Ru. event as sputtering?
There is only one Cuban vid, that i know of...

When I saw the Cuban meteor, whoa...what is going on? It ignites, then pauses!

[CharlesChandler]

When I saw the Cuban meteor, whoa...what is going on? It ignites, then pauses!

Yes, I mean 1) the Chelyabinsk and 2) the Cuban meteor. I didn't know that fireballs acted like that! Thermodynamics can't touch that with a ten foot pole. So this has to be EM sputtering.

[justcurious]

just curious:

I personally prefer to get a better handle on the basics. I have some very basic knowledge of electricity, I got my EE degree over 15 years ago, never practised in the field. So I have some re-learning to do there, plus all the plasma stuff, plus a lot more. But the one most important thing, whatever I do propose in a confident manner should at least be based on sound logic and reason.
What is your background Charles?

Sam, that is irrelevant! A logical fallacy! Implying an appeal to authority. At the level we are arguing, that is without good data as evidence, what a person's degreed in makes little difference, as there is disagreement between the experts, and especially in EU, a multidisciplinarian endeavour.

Hold your horses, asking his background was a curiosity, and it`s relevent.
I was under the impression that Charles was some sort of Big Banger diong a Masters in "magnetic reconnection" LOL. He has a GED and high speed internet, now I have more respect for him! And won't get annoyed that he doesn't know the fundamentals of electricity or how to do vector math.
It's relevant to know the background of who you communicate with, for obvious reasons. Look how irritated Viscount got with my "this is simple math" comment and basic drawing that "only EE geeks can understand" and me being in my "EE bubble" and so on. You're reading between the lines too much. So you think that the discussion between me, you, viscount and Charles is disagreement between "experts"? Come on....

And FYI, I don't appeal to authority, in fact the "authorities" generally hate me, and that is the truth.

[justcurious]

When I saw the Cuban meteor, whoa...what is going on? It ignites, then pauses!

Yes, I mean 1) the Chelyabinsk and 2) the Cuban meteor. I didn't know that fireballs acted like that! Thermodynamics can't touch that with a ten foot pole. So this has to be EM sputtering.

You like flashing? Check this out.
I did mention earlier that a lot of the footage of fiereballs out on the net shows flaring and also flashing (like a camera flash).

http://www.space.com/11759-halley-comet ... eball.html

[CharlesChandler]

And won't get annoyed that he doesn't know the fundamentals of electricity or how to do vector math.

Vector math isn't the problem -- this is something that most CAD software developers (like myself) are pretty comfortable with. As concerns the fundamentals of electricity, my whole problem with "educated" folks is that I'm self-educated, which means that I didn't learn all of the same things, all in the same order. If there is something that I missed, that somebody else learned as a freshman in college, then I must not know anything at all. And yet this uneducated know-nothing has ongoing correspondences with research scientists who are encouraging him to continue with his work -- how could that be? So don't dismiss me just yet. There are things that I should know that I don't. Then again, there are things that I shouldn't know that I do. I realize that this makes communicating difficult, but I should like to point out that you can't judge everybody by the highest grade level that they completed, as if it's one-dimensional. Like Sparky said, especially in a multi-disciplinary topic, you're likely to find odd combinations of intelligence and ignorance. To understand plasma, you have to know all disciplines, including fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, particle physics, and electromagnetism, to name a few. Nobody is an expert on all of that stuff. The only way to proceed is simply to take as little for granted as possible, and to insist on clear statements of all positions. Expect people to be wrong on a regular basis. This is scientific research. If we already understood it, it wouldn't be research. But we're not going to wait for the experts to work it out, and then we can get it all from a textbook, never needing to risk making fools of ourselves by venturing opinions before the experts weighed in. Rather, the experts aren't competing, because they've locked down on the standard approach (i.e., quantum mechanics, general relativity, and MHD), where the only redeeming value is that the constructs are so obtuse that it's hard to tell that scientists actually don't understand what's going on. So we're the ones who are pushing the envelope. Lurk & learn if you don't want to risk making a fool of yourself, but this is the frontier, where we keep trying new things until we find what works.

Cheers!

[CharlesChandler]

OK folks, I did a bit of photogrammetry, to determine where, exactly, the brightest flash occurred, relative to the trail that is visible after the bolide has passed. Turns out that viscount was exactly right -- the brightest flash occurs as the bolide is at the very end of the fattest part of the trail.

The following image is one frame from the series that I used. It's a high-contrast reduction of frame #630 (dash-cam time of 31:01), when nearly the entire image was whited out. The red dashed line represents the path of the bolide, interpolated from the earlier and later frames. The light blue lines are construct lines projected back from successive frames, and which represent the beginning and end of the "fat trail". And the green line is a fitted curve through previous and successive locations of the bolide. So where the red dashed line intersects the green line is where the bolide should actually be in the image. As we can see, they intersect at the latter blue line, meaning that the brightest flare was at the end of the fattest part of the trail.

2013-02-15_Chelyabinsk_explosion.png (8.53 KiB) Viewed 10171 times

To see the whole thing, go to http://qdl.scs-inc.us/?top=7794. The screen caps have been aligned to a common reference point. This should have gotten the location of the bolide from one frame to the next to fall into a nice straight line, except for the fact that the car was moving, it went around a turn, and the dashcam had a fish-eye lens. But I'm satisfied that the curve fitting made up for such irregularities.

I'll explain more if anybody is interested.

Now we just have to figure out what made it act like that!

[viscount aero]

Hold your horses, asking his background was a curiosity, and it`s relevent.
I was under the impression that Charles was some sort of Big Banger diong a Masters in "magnetic reconnection" LOL. He has a GED and high speed internet, now I have more respect for him! And won't get annoyed that he doesn't know the fundamentals of electricity or how to do vector math.
It's relevant to know the background of who you communicate with, for obvious reasons. Look how irritated Viscount got with my "this is simple math" comment and basic drawing that "only EE geeks can understand" and me being in my "EE bubble" and so on. You're reading between the lines too much. So you think that the discussion between me, you, viscount and Charles is disagreement between "experts"? Come on....

And FYI, I don't appeal to authority, in fact the "authorities" generally hate me, and that is the truth.

[viscount aero]

OK folks, I did a bit of photogrammetry, to determine where, exactly, the brightest flash occurred, relative to the trail that is visible after the bolide has passed. Turns out that viscount was exactly right -- the brightest flash occurs as the bolide is at the very end of the fattest part of the trail.

The following image is one frame from the series that I used. It's a high-contrast reduction of frame #630 (dash-cam time of 31:01), when nearly the entire image was whited out. The red dashed line represents the path of the bolide, interpolated from the earlier and later frames. The light blue lines are construct lines projected back from successive frames, and which represent the beginning and end of the "fat trail". And the green line is a fitted curve through previous and successive locations of the bolide. So where the red dashed line intersects the green line is where the bolide should actually be in the image. As we can see, they intersect at the latter blue line, meaning that the brightest flare was at the end of the fattest part of the trail.

2013-02-15_Chelyabinsk_explosion.png

To see the whole thing, go to http://qdl.scs-inc.us/?top=7794. The screen caps have been aligned to a common reference point. This should have gotten the location of the bolide from one frame to the next to fall into a nice straight line, except for the fact that the car was moving, it went around a turn, and the dashcam had a fish-eye lens. But I'm satisfied that the curve fitting made up for such irregularities.

I'll explain more if anybody is interested.

Now we just have to figure out what made it act like that!

Good; I'm glad our observations and time involved investigating is being corroborated between us. The vapor trail that is initially hidden behind the bright flashes--then revealed--is a sort of Rosetta Stone or aerial "fossil record" of what happened. The question and mystery is why is the #2 flash, the biggest one, covering the area of the 2nd bulge, at the thinner part of the vapor trail? And why is the first bulge, the fat one (#1), continuing to billow massive fire within the vapor for a (relatively) long time after the projectile has left the scene? Yet bulge #2 is nowhere near this intensity and volume. The flashes and their corresponding locations within the vapor trail appear counter-intuitive.

[viscount aero]

And won't get annoyed that he doesn't know the fundamentals of electricity or how to do vector math.

Vector math isn't the problem -- this is something that most CAD software developers (like myself) are pretty comfortable with. As concerns the fundamentals of electricity, my whole problem with "educated" folks is that I'm self-educated, which means that I didn't learn all of the same things, all in the same order. If there is something that I missed, that somebody else learned as a freshman in college, then I must not know anything at all. And yet this uneducated know-nothing has ongoing correspondences with research scientists who are encouraging him to continue with his work -- how could that be? So don't dismiss me just yet. There are things that I should know that I don't. Then again, there are things that I shouldn't know that I do. I realize that this makes communicating difficult, but I should like to point out that you can't judge everybody by the highest grade level that they completed, as if it's one-dimensional. Like Sparky said, especially in a multi-disciplinary topic, you're likely to find odd combinations of intelligence and ignorance. To understand plasma, you have to know all disciplines, including fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, particle physics, and electromagnetism, to name a few. Nobody is an expert on all of that stuff. The only way to proceed is simply to take as little for granted as possible, and to insist on clear statements of all positions. Expect people to be wrong on a regular basis. This is scientific research. If we already understood it, it wouldn't be research. But we're not going to wait for the experts to work it out, and then we can get it all from a textbook, never needing to risk making fools of ourselves by venturing opinions before the experts weighed in. Rather, the experts aren't competing, because they've locked down on the standard approach (i.e., quantum mechanics, general relativity, and MHD), where the only redeeming value is that the constructs are so obtuse that it's hard to tell that scientists actually don't understand what's going on. So we're the ones who are pushing the envelope. Lurk & learn if you don't want to risk making a fool of yourself, but this is the frontier, where we keep trying new things until we find what works.

Cheers!

I don't think the basics of electricity are hard to understand. I understand it and I'm an artist. You have + and -, anode and cathode, and potential and movement of these charges creates electrical current. Current seeks a balance and will shed charge in order to find this balance. This shedding of potential can take the form of discharges such as lightning. That's the basics of electricity. One doesn't need a degree in something to understand it.