Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tegeek 1726 days ago
Objects move pretty fast in space, usually tens of kilometers per second. A 20 meter of diameter object with velocity of 10000 mps is pretty deadly impact from Earth's point of view.
1 comments

Not really, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor was 20 meter diameter and hit the atmosphere at about 20 km/s. While there were some ~1500 injured people, the Earth as a whole did not really notice.
From your link:

400-500 kilotons of TNT

I don’t know about you but I’d consider a Hiroshima-scale explosion pretty deadly. We just got lucky it didn’t hit the middle of a major population centre at a more direct angle. That could have been catastrophic.

It would suck to be in the area, yes. But the comment I was responding to said "pretty deadly impact from Earth's point of view." Hiroshima-scale explosions don't make an appreciable dent in the Earth itself, and any human population outside immediate vicinity will still be fine.
How much does the angle of impact come into play?