Boy Survives 30,000 mph Meteorite Impact

This makes my guess that the French air liner near Brazil was taken out by a meteor even more believable. At 30,000 feet this meteor was probably the size of a bowling ball!

At that speed/temperature it must've left a nice clean wound.
The sad thing is that no one is going to believe him...He'll have to make up a better story, like how he foiled the mugger by using his hand to deflect a bullet...yeah, I'd run with that one....even better, he was protecting his girlfiend from the mugger...Oh yeah, come to daddy, that's gotta be the story.
Del

You should not try to catch those things!

Hello Snaketails here, cannot remember logi details while I'm at home :P

Hit him on the hand.....

Ok, thats a bit vague, hit him on the hand but still left a hole in Bitumen (or compacted soil) when it hit the road, there is something missing here, would it be that it deflected off his hand as it passed by very quickly?

Cause, I believe if it did hit his hand (like a hammer hitting your thumb as you try to hit that damn nail) he would have more than a 3" scratch (the hammer "hits" your finger much slower than 30,000mph and look at the damage it does)

Or would it have been plasma from the intense heat generated as the thing is still trying to move thru this very dense atmosphere, and he as blown backwards from the shockwave (resembling thunder that is generated when lightning rips through the air)

Can I lay a claim that I get "hit" by billions of particles moving at close the speed of light (whatever name the photons are we call light)

The faster it goes, the less damage it does after a certain speed, like the candle through the barn door...clean hole. Maximum damage is when all the projectile energy is transferred to the object...e.g the projectile doesn't come out the other side.

Del

A one in a million chance? Seems a bit high.

Actually, if there has only been one other person who was hit and survived, doesn't that make it more like a 1 in 3 billion chance? Assuming that there are roughly 6 billion people on Earth.....

for sure. I think that it is incalculable, because we also don't know how many meteorites penetrate the atmosphere, or accurately how many humans there are at any given time. and how do they know it was going 30000 mph and not 25000?

Intersting, Because a bullet's damage is caused more from the shock wave then the bullet itself.