[meteorite-list] The Meteorite Wiki: For The World

[Meteorites USA]

Good Morning Listees,

Hope everyone had a great week last week. I've had a great time this 
past week, and have received a large number of emails and phone calls 
from friends in this community congratulating me on creating the 
Meteorite Wiki. I'd like to say thank you very much for all the kind 
words, advice and suggestions for the site, I do appreciate all of it. 
But I find it kind of weird to receive these kind words on something 
that should have been created long ago. Why it wasn't I have no idea as 
it's something that is greatly needed by the meteorite world, and now 
the main stream.

With increasing awareness of meteorite falls, fireballs, asteroids, 
including the mighty mid-air explosions over Indonesia, and even a few 
hoaxes as the media spins more and more fantastic tales about asteroids, 
meteorites and meteors it's more important than ever to provide an 
information source that will help educate the public about meteorites, 
the events that surround them and the science behind them.

This is especially important given the massive media attention and the 
inaccurate data being reported. That is a huge problem in and of itself. 
Poor reporting by lazy reporters and skewed data are constant problems.

On a more positive note, we can be happy about the millions of viewers 
that the new and exciting Meteorite Men cable television series on the 
Science Channel will garner. A lot of these people will become 
fascinated by them, and hopefully will be amazed enough to research more 
information on them. The show I think will create a whole new group of 
meteorite collectors and hunters through the ingenious adventure/science 
theme of the show, and most likely will add a few new scientists to the 
meteorite world as well. To be able to entertain and educate at the same 
time about the coolest rocks on the face of the planet has to rank up 
there. It doesn't get much more exciting than that.

Meteorites will continue to grow in popularity as awareness increases. 
Millions of people will watch the show yes, and millions more will watch 
the new movie by director Roland Emmerich called 2012.

Most are familiar with the ominous 2012 date from the Mayan calendar 
because the calendar inexplicably ends on the date of December 21 2012, 
which some believe marks the end of the world. Some believe that it 
foretells of the future impact of a massive asteroid with the Earth in 
which all life will be extinguished in a huge ball of fire wiping out 
all living creatures and human beings in the process.

Thanks to Roland Emmerich's new 2012 movie and the countless millions of 
people and websites surrounding this event, the date is now etched in 
the minds of hundreds of millions of people across the globe, and the 
closer we get to this date, the more interest in asteroids there will 
be, and in turn the more interest there will be in meteorites!

Given the recent 50 kiloton explosion (equivalent to 110 million pounds 
of TNT explosives) of an untracked and very scientifically surprising 
asteroid over Indonesia just a few weeks ago, this proves there's more 
out there than we can possibly track and raises some alarm as well. 
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news165.html

Many scientists were taken by surprise and were amazed at the force and 
size of the mid-air explosion. It's been reported that no one knew it 
existed until it exploded over land scaring thousands of locals and 
setting off infrasound detection systems thousands of miles away.

I can't really mention all this without mentioning NASAs new Asteroid 
Watch program http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch/ and of course the 
NEO (Near Earth Object Program) http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ both of which 
track, record and notify interested parties of the potential hazards of 
the extraterrestrial visitors we lovingly know as asteroids. Many of 
NASAs program participants and scientists are ever more aware of the 
social networking craze that has taken the internet world by storm, and 
have implemented and created their own social network accounts on 
Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and other popular websites.

This revolution of online networking has allowed the worlds best 
advertising system (word of mouth) to become electronic in nature 
spreading the word around the world in a matter of seconds! Combine that 
with cell phones, PDAs, and broadband enabled laptops and other mobile 
computing technology you can see the power and importance of having the 
right information available to those who search for it.

So the next time there's a large fireball event, a meteorite fall, or 
when NASA discovers a new asteroid impactor or scientists find, track 
and predict an impact like that of Asteroid 2008 TC3, there will be a 
source of information and knowledge readily available for the curious, 
for the educator, and for the media to compile accurate data for their 
reports.

We'll have an informational database for the worlds meteorite knowledge 
created by the people for the people and to educate the people about 
those rocks we love so much.

I hope you will take part in the new Meteorite Wiki and help share the 
science and knowledge of meteorites with the world!

Regards,
Eric Wichman
Meteorites USA
Founder
The Meteorite Wiki
www.MeteoriteWiki.com

P.S. There's been many more pages created on the wiki so far, and all of 
them are open for editing and article contribution. If you are an 
educator, scientist, and/or an expert in your field of study and feel 
there needs to be a page article dedicated to a certain topic you're 
invited to create a Meteorite Wiki account and contribute your work. You 
are welcome to include a credit/by line and date if you wish, and link 
to any reference and relevant links to an "External Links" section at 
the bottom of the page article.

Here's a short list of pages that either have been created already or 
are being created now.
http://www.meteoritewiki.com/index.php/Special:AllPages

If you can think of a topic that needs to be covered, by all means drop 
me an email, sign up and create it!

Enjoy...