![]() The meteor shattered into a cloud of debris that fell over an area from Aleksandrovka to Deputatskiy and Timiryazevsky, with the largest bits hitting Lake Chebarkul, where they made a 22-ft (7-m) hole in the ice. As the fireball formed at an altitude of 19 miles (30 km), it was brighter than the Sun and the energy of the passage and explosion was distributed at various altitudes, which contributed to the damage on the ground. According the report, the meteor entered Earth's atmosphere at over 42,500 mph (19 km/s). From these, they calculated the trajectory by matching the path of the meteor against stars visible in the videos.įrom the calculations and other data, the team constructed a map showing blast damage along a 55-mile (90-km) wide path. The team visited over 50 villages, talked to witnesses, selected the ten best videos, and did on-site measurements of angles of the meteor’s flight. "Based on infrasound data, the brightness of the fireball, and the extent of the glass damage area, we confirm that this event was 100 times bigger than. ![]() "Our goal was to understand all circumstances that resulted in the damaging shock wave," says Jenniskens. Shortly after the incident, a team led by Olga Popova of the Institute for Dynamics of Geospheres of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of NASA’s Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute assembled 59 researchers from nine countries to try to sort out what had happened and what had caused it. In all, 1,491 people, including 311 children, were injured, 70 cases of flash blindness were reported, and the fireball put out so much UV radiation that many people suffered from sunburn.ĭamage cased by the Chelyabinsk meteor (Image: Nikita Plekhanov/ Wikipedia) The detonation broke windows and damaged buildings. When it exploded, the 500 kiloton blast was 40 times the explosive force of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Last February, a fireball brighter than the Sun streaked across the morning sky in a spectacle seen by thousands, recorded by dashboard cameras all over the region, and was heard by scientific instruments around the world. It was the closest call the Earth has had since the Tunguska impact in 1908 made a mess of a large part of Siberia. The Chelyabinsk incident wasn't just another shooting star. Last Friday, NASA announced a new report published in Science that used videos and eyewitness accounts to provide new insights into the incident and the nature of the object that caused it. On February 15 of this year, the Earth dodged a bullet of cosmic proportions as a meteoroid exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia with the force of a nuclear weapon.
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