A small object from space exploded over Russia last night. The object was believed to have weighed about 10 tons. It did an incredible amount of damage, for something so small.
A terrifying meteorite shower left more than 950 people injured, buildings devastated and the mobile network wiped out when it hit Russia this morning.
Brightly burning rocks could be seen for miles as they crashed at around 9.20am local time and one bystander described it ‘like a scene from the Armageddon movie.’
The meteorite is believed to have landed in a lake near Chebarkul, a town in the neighbouring Chelyabinsk region.
The city of Chelyabinsk, 900 miles east of Moscow and close to the Kazakhstan border, took the brunt of the super sonic impact.
This object, most likely a small asteroid, was small by space standards. The one that will near-miss earth this afternoon is far larger. If that object struck the ground in an urban area, it could wipe out much of a large city.
Talking about such a strike is one thing. Seeing it is quite another.
Reports so far indicate that more than 500 people were injured. Several buildings in the strike zone have been heavily damaged.
The last time earth experienced a strike of this magnitude was in 1908. A space object exploded over the lightly populated Tunguska region of Siberia, destroying forests for miles around. Today’s object was only about 10 tons, nowhere near the size of the Tunguska object or the asteroid that will near-miss earth this afternoon.
Years ago, before I became a pundit, I worked on NASA’s Hubble project. During that time I produced and wrote a multimedia exhibit for museums about Tunguska and the threat posed by near-earth space objects. Tunguska has spawned a century of research about space threats. We’ll see a hasty scramble now as scientists rush to get to Russia to determine the nature and composition of the 2013 object as best as they can.
Update: There are reports that the meteorite created a 20-foot crater. Wow.
More updates on next page.
I’ve often wondered if the Stony Tunguska River object was a “true” meteorite, or perhaps a piece of comet core. The airburst would be more what I’d expect of a conglomerate object, composed mainly of ice, possibly with elemental hydrogen and some O2 in the mix.
Heated to incandescence by air friction, what resulted could have been basically a “steam explosion”. If hot enough, a hydrogen partial fusion reaction might have been part of the event.
This would explain the apparent lack of a central mass, or even a crater of the expected size, at the projected impact center of the Tunguska object. Not to mention the “telephone pole” forest.
I’m now wondering if this one might not be something similar. Mostly, I’m glad it was “only” a ten-tonner. Anything significantly bigger would have been not just damaging, but probably catastrophic.
cheers
eon
I think the consensus about Tunguska is that it was a large, though low density object, perhaps similar to a comet – maybe a dirty snowball. That means it would’ve had the mass to affect a massive explosion, and also seemingly disappear.
If the asteroid that’s going to come close to Earth today has been wandering around the solar system and close to gravitational fields, maybe even Earth on a previous occasion, and if it’s a loose rubble pile, one has to wonder if the one that hit Russia was once a part of it. Gravitational tidal forces could have calved a once larger rock pile, and rather than a single asteroid, the main body could have a small fleet of rocks strung out thousands of kilometers ahead of it and behind it, traveling along with it.
It could be a similar Roche Limit dynamic to the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet which hit Jupiter in 1994.
No, FB. I just talked to a colleague” the Siberian object did not ome in on the same orbit, so … totally coincidental to 2012 DA14.
Wondered about that. Wow, so it’s a shooting gallery out there.
Likely the tunguska body was part of the Beta-Taurids, remains of the parent of comet Encke which was calculated to have broken up within the last 24-40 ka.
Excellent. In that You Tube from the highway, you can see the air burst explosion process from atmospheric heating and material differentiation. Cool
If Russia has gone capitalist, they should look at the debris as money from God. Ebay get for the space rocks!
Wouldn’t it have been wonderful..a divine justice of sorts if the
meteor had landed smack on top of the Kaaba in Mecca ?
What a delightful spectacle that would have been!
Divine justice? I have sometimes wondered what something like that would do to that religion. The reactions could be interesting, especially considering how many of the adherents seem to live somewhere in the middle ages.
Don’t even have to ponder it. They’d say it was allah’s anger with them because they aren’t killing enough infidels.
Probably. One might daydream of an event when one lands in the middle of the place, but spares Kaaba, we get those declarations of how it is divine wrath because they have fallen from grace (or whatever the Muslim equivalent is) and have to return back to being more diligent, and right after that another lands smack in the middle and destroys Kaaba… oh hell, probably wouldn’t work either.
Maybe one should just hope that if anything like that happens it does before there is something like working asteroid mining. After that, whether they had anything to do with it or no, it’s the fault of those soulless entrepreneurs – either they are a front for some western agency or another, so they did it, or it’s their fault because they didn’t stop it even though they at least theoretically might have.
I’d settle for Washington, D.C., Hollywood, or San Francisco (yes, I’m a terrible person).
Pity it didn’t land on Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi’s house. What a shame. Are you sure it wasn’t a drone strike? Ya never know with Obama.
There is still that 45 mile wide one passing by, hopefully, in a few hours. Maybe these two incidents will shake up the powers that be enough to take hunting and defending against asteroids seriously.
Then again maybe not. It’s not like another fairly large one passed by in the 1990′s with a fair amount of media attention and the Most Wise in DC at the time didn’t just laugh off concerns about it and other such things then go back to trying to spend vast sums of money they didn’t have in order to buy more votes.
However, it would have been pretty cool had this thing hit Mars or even the moon. Mars might have been better: even though it would have been out of eyesight, probes could still see the 400 plus mile wide crater. An impact on the moon would have been spectacular, though the rain of debris onto Earth might be a problem.
Meters, not miles.
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosuars was only six miles wide.
Interesting. Stories last week were saying miles and kilometers but now they are saying meters and yards?
2012 DA14 is estimated to be 50 meters in diameter. Where were you seeing it measured in miles?
That was the measurement in some articles last week. It made sense with all the media play it was getting. A 45 meter asteroid would have been bad news for a relatively small area so I don’t get all the fuss now with the smaller measurements.
The 1908 Tunguska event impacted a remote frozen tree covered swamp. It flattened a forest but no large remnant has been recovered, and no certain real time information, such as this excellent report, exists. For some scale, a difficult task for most folks, the reported Tunguska mass (weight on earth) 220 million pounds, is 110,000 tons relative to the 10 ton impact today. Speed, and trajectory, impact angle, are equally important. Obviously neither was a terminal event. There have been “infinitely” larger impacts, e.g. in the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula – Gulf of Mexico area, which extinguished all life forms on earth. The moon is thought to be an aggregation of ejected debris from an ancient impact.
In my field, nuclear power plant engineering, we wrestled with the probabilities of damage from these phenomena, as well as seismic damage, e.g. Fukashima Japan. The structures and systems can survive the vibration of large events, but no man made design can withstand a direct hit. An meteor ocean impact could cause a massive tsunami at great distance. Fukashima guess wrong, low, and paid the price. Their emergency electrical system, in the basement, was drowned.
I note that today’s impact hit “near” life sustaining Russian nukes, which do not have the toughness of US designs. I have read no damage reports from them. The impact site is about 900 miles west of Tomsk Russia, H bomb central.
I wish them well.
All?
The Chicxulub event at the end of the Cretaceous led to the extinction of most dinosaurs, but modern birds are believed to be living descendants of dinosaurs that survived. There were mammals extant at the time as well, and enough of them survived to give rise, eventually, to us.
Good catch.
In drafting a technical paragraph, not a book, it is impossible to precisely convey, “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”, particularly for a trained person. One must chop. And be exposed to correction; it comes with the territory. My intent is to offer some level of understanding of rare events in our society, for non technical people. Give some basis for objective judgment.
I have observed that many experts hide their true intent in techno-babble, and many politicians simply are ignorant, or lie. Communicating technology is not simple, or easy. Examples: Climate change, nuclear power risks, energy policy.
Thank you.
Once again, this story highlights an important fact. If you see a bright flash, duck! Don’t go staring at it or break out your cellphone to record it. The video camera aspect of cell phones is making idiots out of a lot of people. A tornado is coming, quick, let me catch it on my iPhone!
No, dummy, head for shelter!
It’s because they don’t have civil defense drills. It was kinda fun huddling under my desk, too young to really know why…
This is a crisis.
Taxes must be raised and guns must be confiscated.
CO my hero.
Slap the fragments into a big silver imitation of a Cadillac tailfin! Build a big black cube to house them—stat!
We are witnessing the birth of a new religion!
Global warming…has to be the thermal attraction. That CNN announcer was prescient.
But then again, maybe this was just a shot across the bow of Vladamir and Dear Leader Benevolent Barack reminding them they ain’t that grand.
So you’re going to slow the rising seas, hey Barry? Here, catch this.
God’s Scuds. Who knew?
Lighting on the Basilica
Turning Russia into silica
Taking our guns
Except in the hood
Ahm a goin’ to be a gettin’
While the Armageddon’s good.
Biggest interdimensional cross rip since the Tunguska blast of 1909.
Strikes like this are quite a bit more common than most would believe. Kiloton range hits occur on average about five times per year, but most happen over the ocean. Megaton range hits happen about once every hundred years. http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/newsbulletin/2003/02/19/text02.shtml
About 25 days late and a few thousand miles too far east. I was praying for something like this to hit Washington DC on inauguration day. Oh well, better luck next time!
Seems to me you’re being awfully picky about the timing. Granted, inauguration day would have sent a particular message, but we must not look a gift horse in the mouth.
2012 DA14 missed us by 17,230 miles. According to an expert interviewed on a NASA webcast it may come back around, possibly passing even closer, in 2080.
Why would we believe NASA on asteroids and meteors when we don’t believe them on climate change?
Because meteoroids have to obey the laws of orbital movement, while “climate change” obeys only the laws of “whatever gets its advocates the money and power they lust after”.
There’s no way that a meteoroid impact can be “gamed” to put us all in mud huts while our enlightened overlords live in castles. If a Chicxulub-level event occurs, they’re as dead as the rest of us, movies like 2012 and Deep Impact notwithstanding.
I suspect they deeply resent this.
cheers
eon
Some “expert” who was interviewed on the local Fox channel last night, had predicted that there would be some meteor strike accompanying the asteroid and claimed that there was a 98% chance that the Russian meteor was it. In the other hand, NASA has claimed that because of the direction in came from that it could not have been asteroid-related. ???
And now an MIT professor agrees that it was from the asteroid:
http://www.myfoxboston.com/video?clipId=8398415&autostart=true
If the one that hit Russia was only, say, 20 ft. wide originally, and DA14 is 150, just imagine the destruction simple speed is capable of and what would’ve happened had DA14 hit us. A small hill of perhaps near solid iron traveling faster than a rifled bullet. Needless to say, that would be a tremendous blast. Near a city, the concussion might even take out buildings.
Nature has a preliminary size of the bolide at 15 meters, 7000 tons and a kinetic energy of 188 Kilotons 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