Asteroids, meteors and meteorites on TV

Posted by Richard Miles at 16:13 on 2013 Mar 11

A good documentary for sure. There was one mistaken comment I picked up on – look out for the last sentence in the following commentary:23:14[Iain Stewart]But could there have been another scenario? The meteorite landed at a latitude of 55 degrees North. Had it arrived just a few hours later, we would have been directly in its flight path. So was this a near-miss for us?23:36[Alan Fitzsimmons]If the asteroid had been in a different part of its orbit so it didn’t hit THIS year but it hit NEXT year, it would have still hit us on February 15th but instead of coming in over Russia, it would have come in over the UK and Ireland and would have entered the Earth’s atmosphere in fact entered the North Atlantic Ocean.23:55[Iain Stewart] In order for the meteorite to strike anywhere near Britain, our paths through space would have had to be fundamentally different.I think Alan was saying somewhat the opposite – in fact the asteroid would just have had to have been at a point along its orbit one sidereal year behind where it actually was. The Earth would then have rotated another 365.25 times lining up the trajectory with the North Atlantic. So the paths through space wouldn’t have to have been different – rather it’s the position of the asteroid along its orbit which would need to have been different.