Chelyabinsk: What, Exactly, Just Happened? (Updated)
When you have the largest land mass on Earth, you’re an all-too-likely target.
This morning, Russia was hit once again by a space object, as a bolide exploded over Chelyabinsk, just east of the Ural Mountains, in western Siberia. Eastern Siberia is the site of the largest known strike in modern times, a little over a century ago. It hit in Tunguska in 1908, an air burst with the force of a nuclear weapon, leveling trees for miles around but fortunately injuring or killing few in the sparsely populated region. Had it instead hit in today’s (or even that day’s) New York City, the blast would have killed and injured millions.
And much larger events are possible. To the degree that such a thing can exist, there is now a scientific consensus that the dinosaurs (who didn’t have a space program) were wiped out by a large strike in the Yucatan sixty-five million years ago, clearing the way for placental mammals, who did eventually develop a space program.
Fortunately, today’s event was much smaller — an explosion high in the atmosphere as entry heating first melted and then boiled the ice inside the frozen rock from deep space, turning it to steam, which blasted the extraterrestrial intruder to pieces. But it happened in a populated area, and the shock wave shattered windows in buildings, injuring over a thousand people at last report. It’s interesting to note in observing the extraordinary video coming from Russia (partially a consequence of so many drivers having dashcams to protect against rampant police corruption) how accurate the special-effects folks in Hollywood have been.
Given that there is a close flyby of another object today, missing the Earth by only a whisker in astronomical terms (just a few earth radii away, and inside the orbit of our communications satellites), it seems like a strange coincidence in terms of timing. When I heard the news of the Russian strike this morning, my most immediate thought was that it was a fellow traveler.
Objects like this are often the result of a breakup of a larger one earlier in the solar system’s history, perhaps due to a collision. Over the eons, the orbits of the ancient debris slowly drift apart from initial differences in their velocity, and from slight differences in infinitesimal forces of solar radiation and wind, and from outgassing, creating a little armada of rocks or ice in loose formation.
The most spectacular example of such a fleet striking a planet was almost two decades ago, when the Hubble Space Telescope watched the debris from the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 bombard Jupiter, the biggest target in the solar system outside of our star itself, over a period of almost a week. (By remarkable coincidence, it occurred from July 16 through July 22 in 1994, exactly a quarter of a century after the first Apollo lunar landing, whose mission occurred almost exactly over those same dates in 1969, with a return on the 24th.)
So the latest Russian event prompts us to ask if 2012 DA14, the object that has been predicted to fly by for a while (its name indicates that it was discovered last year), is just the largest of a swarm of much smaller ones, previously undetected as this one was, that may continue to hit us for days, like aftershocks of an earthquake.
Initial reports indicated that it was just a coincidence. ESA has claimed that it was unrelated, and NASA scientist Don Yeomans points out that it had a much different trajectory:
Yeomans stressed that the bolide event was likely not associated at all with the incoming asteroid 2012 DA14, which will fly within 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometers) of Earth when it passes safely by our planet today.
“The asteroid will travel south to north,” Yeomans said. “The bolide trail was not south to north and the separation in time between the fireball and 2012 DA14 close approach is significant.”
But some (including me) think that the jury is still out:
The different flyby directions at perigee don’t tell us much. … For departure trajectories we can sketch an entire family of outgoing hyperbolae with asymptotes parallel to the desired departure vector, but with completely different earth-centered inclinations. See the attached scan from Wiesel (1989) but imagine the arrows pointing the other way, to see how two asteroids with slightly different ecliptic inclinations could wind up with radically different (perhaps even 180 degrees different) Earth-centered inclinations at perigee.
I’m not claiming the two objects are related, just saying we can’t rule it out until the trajectory of this new object is traced back to find the asymptote of its approach hyperbola and compare it to 2012DA14.
Either way, it simply points out that, as former NASA astronaut/astrophysicist Ed Lu and British Astronomer Royal Lord Martin Rees pointed out just yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, we’re not being diligent enough, as a nation or civilization, in either tracking such objects or in developing means of diverting them from their deadly courses:
We have the technology to deflect these asteroids — through small spacecraft known as kinetic impactors and gravity tractors that can change an asteroid’s trajectory — but only if we have years of advance warning. We discovered 2012 DA14 only a year ago, so had it been on a collision course with Earth, there is nothing we could have done about it except evacuate the area near the expected impact site and hope for the best.
To defend ourselves, we first have to find and track the asteroids (like 2012 DA14) large enough to do great damage should they strike Earth. There are about one million such asteroids in dangerous orbits near Earth, yet scientists have identified the trajectories of less than 1% of them (fewer than 10,000). For every 2012 DA14 we know of, there are 99 more we know nothing about.
Despite our ignorance of the threat, and despite all of the warnings we’ve received — from Tunguska, to Shoemaker-Levy 9, and now the latest hit and close pass — it has been difficult to get Congress to adequately fund the kind of systems we need. The nature of the orbits of these objects means that they’re hard to see from Earth, partly because we have to look toward the Sun. The best place to look for them is from far out in the solar system, which requires a space telescope that can operate many millions of miles from Earth. As Dr. Lu notes in his piece, we can’t wait for the government any more. He’s founded a private non-profit foundation to raise the funds from individuals with more foresight than the solons on the Hill, and to build and launch such a telescope, called “Sentinel.” He’s also developed a method of gently moving such objects, called a gravity tractor, without breaking them up, which would just create a potentially bigger mess. And of course, beyond this non-profit effort, two companies have formed in the past year — Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries — who plan to mine such bodies for profit, which will of necessity involve technologies required to both find and move them.
So call your congressman, and tell him that we need to do more, but it will be even more productive to make a donation to an organization that is determined to do so, and to support the new space mining industry. If saving the planet from the Carbon Menace is worth trillions in lost economic growth, surely today’s events are a timely reminder that we can save it from something that we know has had devastating effects, at times wiping out much of the life on it, for only paltry millions.
More: Did Another Space Rock Crash in Cuba?
[Afternoon update]
OK, it looks like the two objects have completely different solar orbits. That is, they’re independent events, with extraordinarily coincidental timing. If you look at the bottom of this graphic from the Telegraph, you can see that they came at earth from paths almost perpendicular to each other. But if anything, this just makes the point stronger that we never know when we’re going to be hit by something that we didn’t see coming, unless we start looking for them seriously.
“Given that there is a close flyby of another object today, missing the Earth by only a whisker in astronomical terms (just a few earth radii away, and inside the orbit of our communications satellites), it seems like a strange coincidence in terms of timing. When I heard the news of the Russian strike this morning, my most immediate thought was that it was a fellow traveler.” Wait,… what? A fellow traveler exploded over Russia? Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were innocent, innocent I say!
large bodies traveling thru space surely pick up partners, what w/ all the flux fields and gravity whatever. who knows? but we are seeing a lot of more meterorific activity lately in our little corner.
btw, let’s not forget we have a really big visitor coming to visit in november, ’13. comet ison. n.a.s.a. already has some pix. read that it might light up the sky like a second coming of obummer healthcare.
and then there is that niburu (planet x) flyby that could destroy all but our polititians, comfortably situated in ecret u.g. bunkers we paid for. who was the genius that decided earth should be repopulated by scrumbag lawyers?
I wonder what would have happened if this thing had fallen in, say, 1981. Would the Soviets have assumed it was a nuclear attack of some sort? What do MIRVs actually look like when they’re coming down? I could only find one clip on Youtube and it wasn’t very helpful. Could the radar of the day tell the difference between a warhead and a meteorite?
Apparently that exact scenarion did, in fact, play out sometime during the 80s (?). An object that exploded in the atmosphere was briefly believed to be a Soviet ICBM. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and they figured it out.
Please get your facts right before commenting something like that. What actually happened, was their brand new satellite based early warning system created a false alarm by detecting reflections of sun beams off of higher altitude clouds, thus triggering the alarm, as if a ballistic launch would be started. Here, read the whole story – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident
Yes, radar of 1981 would have easily shown that the object was traveling far faster than a MIRV. A maximum MIRV velocity would be no more than about 7-9 km/sec. That object was moving at about 20-30 km/sec. A radar would have easily shown the difference in velocity.
Oho! So my Roche Limit calving/fleet theory is still alive.
Hey Rand – I’m going to call Congress. Should I ask them to refund Space Shuttle construction so we can effectively deal with travel to asteriods threatening earth?
Just messin’ with ya.
Naah. They’ll just use the money for “Muslim outreach.”
I figure the Russians will be inspired to build a better system for tracking and dealing with unwanted space objects than we ever could.
Yeah, large meteors seem to like Russia. Besides Tunguska in 1908 and Chelyabinsk in 2013, there was also a remarkable strike in 1947.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikhote-Alin_meteorite
Rod Blagojevich: How could I be guilty of selling, if Jesse Jackson Jr. was not guilty of buying?
http://illinoispaytoplay.com/2013/02/16/rod-blagojevich-how-could-i-be-guilty-of-selling-if-jesse-jackson-jr-was-not-guilty-of-buying/
Oh, come on. Of course it’s “related”.
What, you believe in astronomical coincidence, guys? It just HAPPENED to occur during a close approach?
Sheesh.
It’s all Sarah Palin’s fault!
Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone knows this is a Jewish Zionist plot gone awry. It was supposed to blow up over Iran.
Of course it was the Jews. The Jews rule the world…or shall I say WORLDS!
I’m sure some of spenglers buddies over at Asia Times will see this as some sort of false flag attack! But I didn’t hear the Zionist deny this yet. Case closed! Guilty!
Ya mean it wasn’t caused by globull worming?
Booooosh
With Dr. Cheney No, of course, the real mastermind behind it.
It’s all because of global warming, climate change, global cooling, the NRA, racism…
Mainly the NRA. Large-bore assault meteorites.
Congress should pass a law requiring a waiting period for meteors, which would allow people time to get out of their path. Problem solved.
“”It’s all because of global warming, climate change, global cooling….”"
In practicality, this is true. Just think of the funding that’s been wasted on faux global warming/climate change theories that should have been spent on researching actual cosmic threats.
If DA 14 doesn’t show any effects of gravitational tides as it passes Earth gravitational field (including its coloring) it may be suggestive it has already gone through such a process, a former, rather than current, rubble pile.
Why would something that small experience noticeable tides? Tidal forces are proportional to the size of the object they are acting on. The oceans experience noticeable tides because the Earth is very large compared to the Moon. Human beings, on the other hand, do not feel the minuscule lunar tidal forces that act on us.
That’s only insensitive, conservative humans that do not feel it.
/
Or, it may be suggestive of being a very tiny object.
Rand, my understanding is that the solar orbits are completely different. The timing seems to be pure coincidence.
Pah! My theory’s dead again.
…my understanding is that the solar orbits are completely different.
If that’s the case, then I stand corrected, but I hadn’t seen anyone actually say that. They only talked about the different directions of entry, and timing differences, neither of which would rule out a related event.
After the earth geniuses end global warming they will no doubt go to work right away shooting down asteroids.
I wish I could believe that. I think it’s more likely that they’d decide that the meteors, comets and other space objects are natural objects that are entitled not to be damaged by unenlightened humans, just like we have to hold the protection of obscure animals and plants sacrosanct here on Earth.
Look at Californians who aren’t allowed to clear brush that endangers them from very real fire threats for fear of endangering the habitats of obscure animals. I expect we’d see the same priority placed on meteors and the like.
In the Star Wars movies there was an asteroid that sustained living creatures. Therefore until we know differently, we must assume all meteors and asteroids are also the homes of animals. Therefore we are morally obligated to not harm meteors or asteroids.
We should shoot them down or ‘tractor’ them safely away; remember Andromeda Strain.
Phil Plait, an astronomer, says its not related. He knows the math better than I ever will.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy.html
Ummm, isn’t this how War of the Worlds started? or the more resent Battle Los Angeles
I just watched “Battle: Los Angeles” for the first time on Monday night. Explain *that* coincidence.
Oh, I notice that kind of synchronicity often. Here’s one from the early ’80s: I found a silly old movie, playing on a North Dakota TV channel, about a commercial flight having to evade the Soviet air force near Kamchatka. Later that same week KAL 007 hit the fan.
Personally I suspect the universe is configured less randomly than we’ve been led to believe.
If the rocks were switched, how likely is it that we would have spotted 2012 DA14 considering it came in from the direction of the sun? Would the glare have made it difficult to impossible?
Why am I hearing Russian media report that background radiation levels are normal? Are radiation levels in that area something they have had problems with in the past? Kinda weird.
I was reading that background radiation has been unnaturally high in the Chelyabinksk region since the 40s. That’s the area where the first generation of Soviet nukes were made and apparently radioactive materials were routinely dumped right in rivers and lakes. The region has had unusually high cancer rates since then, even though later generations of nukes were developed elsewhere and the waste radioactive materials contained somewhat better.
Make no mistake about it, the former Soviet Union, for all its Hard Left ideology, was NOT the sort of place that cared about the environment. They were far more ruthless about exploiting resources than the capitalists ever were.
Tell that to the people who were used as guinea pigs for nuclear testing by various western nuclear powers. Or the traditional land-owners in out-of-the-way places who saw their land and lives destroyed by western mining companies.
“Capitalism” is obviously much better these days, but in the 40′s? Not so much.
And the only reason “capitalism” upped its game is because of whinging leftists campaigning to make it happen.
Everything you have just posted is complete and utter BS. Just FYI.
You’ve never seen film of U.S soldiers being marched directly towards a giant mushroom cloud? I have.
You’ve obviously never lived near a 19th or first half of the 20th Century mining province either. When it played out, they just left it where it laid and left. Likewise, the US Military just left it all where it laid and left when it was finished with something. As late as the mid-’80s, the last time I was out there much, Western Alaska was littered with abandoned military installations from the Cold War era that looked like everyone had just got up and left everything just as it sat. Some stuff even from WWII was still just laying there until recently, maybe some still is.
My hometown in Georgia has a Superfund Site where a textile printing and finishing plant once was. Some Yankee company moved to The South in the ’50s to get away from Northern costs and unions and Southerners anxious to get off the North end of a Southbound mule would work for the minimum wage and not start agitating for unions. After about twenty years of throwing noxious fumes in the air and dumping raw dye in a nearby creek to the extent that there wasn’t a living thing within a hundred feet of the banks for twenty miles downstream, they just laid everyone off one day, closed the plant, and left the Country.
The original impetus behind the environmental movement was not wrong; America was a mess. Love Canal was just one of the most prominent examples. Burning rivers and dead lakes were just a fact. To this day the State of Georgia advises pregnant women not to eat fish caught in Georgia streams and posts consumption limits for others because of the polution. Until recently, you took your life in your hands to go hiking off marked trails around Juneau, AK because of the unmarked and unguarded air shafts from the mines there; there’s nothing like a sudden drop of a few hundred feet to ruin your day. There was a program to get them all covered in the ’80s and ’90s but nobody is sure that they have them all because no accurate records were kept.
The environmental movement has been highjacked by leftists who simply want to use “the environment” as a way to cripple US productive capacity and they should be opposed at every turn. That doesn’t mean that the companies that so blithely fouled our Country are good guys and that they would behave if we’d just keep those nasty old regulators off their backs. Again in my hometown in Georgia, a metal plateing company jumped through the permitting hoops and built containment tanks for their very toxic wastes and entered into a contract with a local firm to truck that discharge to a toxic waste disposal site. They went through the charade of pumping the tanks every week and the truck went somewhere. They ginned up invoices and receipts, but the reality was that by dark of night they’d built a drainfield akin to a home septic system and were diverting all their toxic wastes into the drainfield from which it leached into the ground water rather than pay the disposal fees. The trucking company was just a brother-in-law deal that they’d set up. That kind of stuff goes on everywhere and every day.
Why Almost Everyone in Russia Has a Dash Cam BY DAMON LAVRINC 02.15.13
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/02/russian-dash-cams/
Nature has a preliminary size of the bolide at 15 meters, 7000 tons and a kinetic energy of 188 kilotons (12 – 13 Hiroshima bombs) if traveling at 15 km/sec. The size estimate is from the Nature article. The energy estimate is from the Cosmic Tusk. Cheers -
http://www.nature.com/news/russian-meteor-largest-in-a-century-1.12438
All you conspiracy loons are missing the real culprit. This was all Xenu.
It’s sort of a funny story, based on, as so many are, a simple bureaucratic foulup. I’ll try to give you the quick, high level view, which I can do thanks to the accurate tracking and resources of the secret underground ARSCC North American Command Center in Northern Colorado.
What happened, was that Xenu had a large chunk of his Martian DC-8 space plane fleet grounded due to some silly battery fire issue. Without adequate transport, which is operated by ISC (Interplanetary Spacelift Command), the frozen re-implanted Body Thetans that routinely get reprocessed there were backing up in the Mars frozen BT handling and storage facilities.
Well, neccessity is the mother of invention. Wouldn’t you know that some ingenius junior Marcab officer proposed freezing a big block of the frozen stored body thetans into one large mass and sending them direct to Earth with no space plane at all. So that’s what they did, freezing the entire backlog into one large glycol block, which was then launched into space via the Sieman’s heavy lift rail gun at Olympus Mons. The load, of course, was aimed at Earth.
What we see on the Russian videos is just that shipment of the brainwashed-reimplanted BTs and their frozen glycol jacket, arriving in our atmosphere. Russian Scientology centers have sent out the word to brace for a large influx of very confused people, as these new BTs begin their infestations
Isn’t that a hoot? Anyway, this is speculation on my part, but the talk around the implant station water cooler is that this method might become the new delivery method for all BTs sent back to Earth. The idea is to freeze a big enough block of them to survive the solar winds, but not make it so big as to draw unnecessary Earth attention to the touch down, as this event did. But with a regularly scheduled rail launch, there won’t be a large backlog as there was in this case.
Love him or hate, you’ve got to tip your hat to the sheer ingenuity and problem solving capabilities of Xenu and the Marcabs. Those guys just don’t mess around.
And now you know the REAL story.
Hi to all you Scientologists out there.
You either already have read or really should read, “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief” by Laurence Wright. It’s a new book about Scientology. The first half about L. Ron Hubbard and the origins of Scientology is great- at times really funny too.
Much better than the movie “The Master” which I thought was a snore-fest.
Nice conspiracy but the alien invasion part is true.
That is why President Obama has pretended to be an America hating leftist with an agenda to destroy our economy, cripple our military and confiscate weapons, leading to an unprecedented surge in purchases of guns and ammunition by Americans. The President knows that the aliens are coming but it is not possible to know where they will land. That is why he has persuaded millions of people who never would have bought a gun before, let alone an AR-15 type weapon, to clean out the gun stores and set manufacturers to put on three shifts.
Those newly armed civilians will be an unpleasant surprise for the extraterrestrials when they arrive.
Let’s raise taxes by a few thousand trillion to deflect the next two bit asteroid which might not come for a million more years and might strike a place empty of people….but you all know the politicians mantra – if it saves one life, a thousand trillion is worth it. News Flash: It ain’t!
Did anyone notice the words “scientific consensus”? It is a euphemism for “cough up or else” – remember Global Warming before Climate Change became the buzzword because the “scientific consensus” was not scientific or a consensus? The sky is falling, the sky is falling!! The Global Warming funding must be drying up.
That “two-bit Asteroid” had a yield when it exploded of ~500 Kilotons. Had it made it several KM deeper into the atmosphere before it’s terminal detonation, it would have the same effect as a thermonuclear weapon detonating (standard airburst altitude is about 3,000 meters). It could theoretically devastate a city of millions and cause hundreds of thousands of casualties.
Yes, “Two-Bit” alright.
“If I wanted America to fail”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ-4gnNz0vc
Dear Washington 76
Your sincere video reminds me of religious wars . The Shia against the sunni. Could it get that bad in USA in politics? Will it look like a religious war?
this act of God in Russia the entire world was able to see instantly. This sign from God maybe for the entire world not just Russia. Are we holy in our own eyes? Is that what is giving us the voice to judge the other as the Shia judge the sunni and the sunni judge the shia.
Is God calling us to become holy in God’s eyes not this holy in our own eyes . Holy in our own eyes fails the test of finding God’s approval.
What must we do?
footnote
this idea of holy can come from the top and flow down to go along with grassroots holy
Putin can begin to go to Orthodox mass 7 days a week confess his sin in private. Here I go to mass almost 24 hours a day building these 12 heavens. Putin I/m sure can fit 7 hours a week for God I believe as an example of world move in a repentant direction
This is a disgusting story. Clearly the Obama administration is behind this heinous meteorite attack. The people demand to know where was Obama when this was going down, why did he just watch it on (dashboard cam) video, why didn’t he dispatch fighter rockets, and why was the meteorite trading in arms confiscated in Libya to Mars? We have a right to know! We must withhold all cabinet appointments until we get some answers! And even when we have answers we should still withhold the appointments until we get the answers we want! Obama is a meteorite lover, willing to put America at risk to advance his own meteoric agenda! Get angry people!