3,000 buildings damaged by meteor likely travelling at least 54,000 km/h
A meteor streaked through the sky and exploded Friday over Russia’s Ural Mountains with the power of an atomic bomb, its sonic blasts shattering countless windows and injuring more than 950 people. The spectacle deeply frightened thousands, with some elderly women declaring the world was coming to an end.
The meteor — estimated to be about 9 tonnes — entered the Earth’s atmosphere at a hypersonic speed of at least 54,000 km/h and shattered about 30 to 50 kilometres above the ground, the Russian Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
It released the energy of several kilotons above the Chelyabinsk region, the academy said.
Amateur video broadcast on Russian television 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.
“There was panic. People had no idea what was happening. Everyone was going around to people’s houses to check if they were OK,” said Sergey Hametov, a resident of Chelyabinsk, a city of 1 million about 1,500 kilometres east of Moscow.
“We saw a big burst of light, then went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud thundering sound,” he told The Associated Press by telephone.
Another Chelyabinsk resident, Alexander Yakovets, told CBC News he was woken in his eighth-floor apartment by a “really horrible sound” that he first thought might have been a terrorist attack or a military exercise.
He said he saw a very bright light and heard multiple explosions.
“For a couple of minutes, I thought [the building] was going to fall down,” he said.
The explosions broke an estimated 100,000 square meters of glass, city officials said.
A Russian health official said 985 people sought medical care after the explosions and most were injured by shards of glass. Athletes at a city sports arena were among those cut up by the flying glass.
It was not immediately clear if any people were struck by space fragments.
Chelyabinsk resident Valya Kazakov said some elderly women in his neighbourhood started crying out that the world was ending.
Injuries on this scale extremely rare
City officials said 3,000 buildings in the city were damaged by the shock wave, including a zinc factory where part of the roof collapsed.
Some fragments fell in a reservoir outside the town of Cherbakul, the regional governor’s office said, according to the ITAR-Tass.
A six-metre-wide crater was found in the same area, which could come from space fragments striking the ground, the news agency cited military spokesman Yaroslavl Roshchupkin as saying.
Reports conflicted on what exactly happened in the clear skies. A spokeswoman for the Emergency Ministry, Irina Rossius, told the AP there was a meteor shower, but another ministry spokeswoman, Elena Smirnikh, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying it was a single meteor.
‘A shooting gallery’
Meteors typically cause sizeable sonic booms when they enter the atmosphere because they are travelling much faster than the speed of sound. Injuries on the scale reported Friday, however, are extraordinarily rare.
Russian news reports noted that the meteor hit less than a day before the asteroid 2012 DA14 is to make the closest recorded pass of an asteroid — about 28,000 kilometres. CBC reporter Bob McDonald said the asteroid is coming from a different direction than the Russia meteor.
“We do live in a shooting gallery,” McDonald said. “It’s one of the hazards of living in a dirty solar system.”
McDonald explained that when the space rock “hits the air, it comes to a screeching halt, and the pressure of the air and the heat on the front side of it, compared to the back side, causes the whole thing to collapse in on itself, and it does that so quickly that there’s just this massive air burst explosion.”
McDonald said the tiny pieces that do make it to the ground will be picked up by people so scientists can determine the exact makeup of the meterorites.
Donald Yeomans, manager of U.S. Near Earth Object Program in California, said it is far too early to provide estimates of the energy released or provide a reliable estimate of the original size.
The site of Friday’s spectacular show is about 5,000 kilometres west of Tunguska, which in 1908 was the site of the largest recorded explosion of a space object plunging to Earth. That blast, attributed to a comet or asteroid fragment, is generally estimated to have been about 10 megatons; it levelled some 80 million trees.
Russian politicians react
The dramatic events prompted an array of reactions from prominent Russians.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, speaking at an economic forum in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, said the meteor could be a symbol for the forum, showing that “not only the economy is vulnerable, but the whole planet.”
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a nationalist leader noted for vehement statements, said “It’s not meteors falling. It’s the test of a new weapon by the Americans,” the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the incident showed the need for leading world powers to develop a system to intercept objects falling from space.
“At the moment, neither we nor the Americans have such technologies” to shoot down meteors or asteroids, he said, according to the Interfax news agency.
The Associated Press
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Asteroid arrives today for extra-close flyby
A 130,000-tonne asteroid will fly closer to Earth today than any other object its size or larger has ever been predicted to come — without making a landing.
The flyby comes after a meteor streaked over the skies of Russian’s Ural Mountains Friday morning, causing sharp explosions and injuring hundreds, many of them hurt by broken glass.
Asteroid 2012 DA14 is about 45 metres in diameter, or just slightly smaller than the Epcot geodesic dome at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.
The space rock is currently zooming toward Earth at 28,100 km/h, or 7.82 kilometres per second.
It will be just 27,700 kilometres above the Earth’s surface — one-tenth of the distance between the Earth and the moon — when it makes its closest approach at 2:25 p.m. ET Friday.
At that point, it will be closer to the Earth’s surface than the man-made communications and weather satellites in geosynchronous orbit, meaning the ones that complete their trip around the Earth once each day. Those satellites are located in a ring about 35,800 kilometres above us.
The asteroid will remain a comfortable distance away from the Earth itself; the International Space Station, which orbits just 386 kilometres above the Earth; and most other man-made satellites, making a collision unlikely. Nor is there any chance it will hit the surface of the Earth, NASA says.
People will be able to watch the flyby live online starting 12 p.m. ET via telescopes in Australia and Europe, where it will be nighttime. Starting 2 p.m., NASA will also be providing live commentary.
The asteroid is too small to be seen with the naked eye, but should be visible using binoculars or a telescope to those looking toward the object’s expected path through the sky.
Astronomers hope to observe the asteroid from around the world to get more information about its size, shape, how fast it is spinning and its makeup.
NASA said it plans to take radar images of the asteroid as it moves away from the Earth between Feb. 16 and 20 to get additional size and shape measurements.
DA14 was first detected last Feb. 23 by astronomers at La Sagra Sky Survey in Spain. It has an orbit around the sun similar to that of the Earth and has been passing relatively close by about twice a year. However, NASA says this time it’s getting close enough that Earth’s gravity will give it a significant nudge, altering its orbit so it travels more quickly around the sun and will fly close to Earth less often.
NASA estimates there are about 500,000 near-Earth asteroids about the size of DA14, and one of them will make a close encounter comparable to this one about every 40 years.
However, until recently, asteroids this small have been difficult to detect until after they have passed the Earth, said Curt Nason, an astronomer with the Saint John Astronomy Club in New Brunswick.
“We could have had a lot closer ones years ago,” he said. “They just couldn’t see them.”
On average, NASA estimates, an asteroid the size of DA14 will actually hit the Earth about once every 1,200 years.
Source: CBC News
