Crashing into the snow, it came from Outer Space

Doesn't this read like the opening scenes of Alien Vs. Predator? Or The Thing?

"On Sept. 3, 2004, the space-based infrared sensors of the U.S. Department of Defense detected an asteroid a little less than 10 meters across, at an altitude of 75 kilometers, descending off the coast of Antarctica. U.S. Department of Energy visible-light sensors built by Sandia National Laboratories, a National Nuclear Security Administration lab, also detected the intruder when it became a fireball at approximately 56 kilometers above Earth. Five infrasound stations, built to detect nuclear explosions anywhere in the world, registered acoustic waves from the speeding asteroid that were analyzed by LANL researcher Doug ReVelle. NASA's multispectral polar orbiting sensor then picked up the debris cloud formed by the disintegrating space rock."

But it's not - more here.

It didn't make much of a Deep Impact, but "some 7.5 hours after the initial observation, a cloud of anomalous material was detected in the upper stratosphere over Davis Station in Antarctica by ground-based lidar. "We noticed something unusual in the data," says Andrew Klekociuk, a research scientist at the Australian Antarctic division. "We'd never seen anything like this before - [a cloud that] sits vertically and things blow through it. It had a wispy nature, with thin layers separated by a few kilometers. Clouds are more consistent and last longer. This one blew through in about an hour."

More here.

Oh, and on the subject of asteroids, "astronomers are debating what to do about Earth's close encounter with an asteroid in 2029 and again in 2036 — passages that might be too close for comfort."

More here.

[+] Tags: George Hopkin | Odd | Science