What was russian meteor

In the local library in Yemanzhelinsk, 30 miles away, a statue of Pushkin cracked when it was struck by a blown-out window frame.

At least 1, people were treated for injuries, most from falling building debris and flying glass. At its most intense, the streaking fireball glowed 30 times brighter than the sun, leaving people on the ground below with skin and retinal burns. One resident in Korkino, 18 miles from the point of peak brightness, lost skin from their face after being burned by radiation.

The intense heat evaporated three quarters of the meteor. Around four to six tonnes reached the ground as meteorites, representing just 0.

The Chelyabinsk airburst was the largest since Tunguska in , but unlike that and other historic events, the strike was recorded by a full suite of modern technology: satellites photographed the meteor from space; security and personal video cameras filmed the rock's violent path across the sky; and sensors picked up infrasound waves as lumps hit the ground.

The largest single piece, weighing around kg, punched a 7 metre-wide hole in ice 70cm thick on Lake Chebarkul, and was recovered from the lakebed in October. The Russians' propensity for using dashboard cameras meant there was a treasure trove of videos of the meteor, as many cameras filmed the explosion while drivers were on the road.

About two weeks after the explosion, scientists were starting to pin down the bolide's size, speed and origin. The infrasound low-frequency signature on the nuclear-detection network, which is operated by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, was the largest ever detected. The energy of the resulting explosion exceeded kilotons of TNT. Chelyabinsk, however, did not produce as much of a blast as the Tunguska meteor, another object that exploded over Siberia in The Tunguska explosion flattened square miles 2, square km of forest.

Although it was a smaller explosion, dust from the Chelyabinsk impact stayed in the atmosphere for months. In October , scientists raised a coffee-table-size piece of the bolide from the lake in which it crashed.

Some of the pieces inside the meteorite were formed in the first 4 million years of solar system history, David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston said in December at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. In the next 10 million years, large rock pieces along with some dust combined to create an asteroid about 60 miles km wide, Kring said. This parent body sustained a large impact with another space object about million years after the solar system was formed, with more strikes coming during the "late heavy bombardment" period — a time of frequent small-body strikes that occurred between 3.

Two other impacts have come in the last million years. Closer to the Chelyabinsk event, the parent body experienced yet another impact and was also nudged out of the main asteroid belt into an orbit that crossed near Earth's. Initially, the Chelyabinsk bolide was thought to be part of NC43 , an asteroid that's 1.

In February , one year after the impact, several scientists said that the danger of small asteroids was now foremost in many public officials' minds, especially because it was said to be the first asteroid-related disaster seen on Earth. NASA also launched a "Grand Challenge" to get input from the public, industry and academia on asteroid-protection methods. A few Chelyabinsk-size objects have flown harmlessly past Earth in the years since the explosion, such as QA2 , which flew within 50, miles 80, km of our planet on Aug.

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