• About 1,100 injured as meteorite hits Russia with force of atomic bomb

     

    Published February 15, 2013
• A meteor streaked across the sky and exploded over Russia's Ural Mountains with the power of an atomic bomb
• its sonic blasts shattering countless windows and injuring about 1,100 people
• estimated to be about 10 tons and 49 feet wide -- entered the Earth's atmosphere at a hypersonic speed of at least 33,000 mph and shattered into pieces about 18-32 miles above the ground
• Amateur video showed an object speeding across the sky about 9:20 a.m. local time, just after sunrise, leaving a thick white contrail and an intense flash.
• The meteor released several kilotons of energy above the region, the Russian science academy said. According to NASA, it was about 15 meters or 49 feet wide before it hit the atmosphere, about one-third the size of the passing asteroid
• Some meteorite fragments fell in a reservoir outside the town of Chebarkul. The crash left a 26-foot-wide crater in the ice.
• The shock wave blew in more than 1 million square feet of glass, according to city officials, who said 3,000 buildings in the city were damaged. At one zinc factory, part of the roof collapsed.
• The Interior Ministry said about 1,100 people sought medical care after the shock wave and 48 of them were hospitalized. Most of the injuries were caused by flying glass
• Russian-language hashtags for the meteorite quickly shot up into Twitter's top trends.
• Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a nationalist leader noted for his vehement statements, blamed the Americans.
• It's not meteors falling. It's the test of a new weapon by the Americans," the RIA Novosti news agency quoted him as saying

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• an asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere over Russia at about 09:20
• estimated speed of 18.6 km/s (over 41,000 mph or 66 960 km/h, almost 60 times the speed of sound at that altitude)

• only about 15 m and about 7000 tonnes - and that's why it wasn't detected
• This object wasn't seen earlier because it was really faint, and it might not have been visible to observers in the night sky
• We discovered 2008 TC3 just outside the lunar orbit some 20 hours before impact, and it was only 3-4 meters across
• it is not because it was too small to see, but because it was hard to observe
• It would take more search telescopes to be able to scan the skies more often and catch everything incoming
• a small Canadian satellite will be launched from India called NEOSSat that will go into a polar orbit, and be able to observe the region 45 degrees from the sun without obscuration by our atmosphere.
• Designed to augment ground based surveys, we hope that this will find objects that might otherwise blind-side us.

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