Posted on 02/15/2013 4:17:13 AM PST by LadyEleanor
Edited on 02/15/2013 4:55:53 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
MOSCOW -- The Russian Academy of Sciences is estimating the meteor that streaked into the skies over the Ural Mountains and caused shock waves that injured more than 400 people weighed about 10 tons (11 tons avoirdupois).
The academy said in a statement hours after the Friday morning fall that the meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of at least 54,000 kph (33,000 mph) and shattered about 30-50 kilometers (18-32 miles) above ground.
The fall caused explosions that broke glass over a wide area. The Emergency Ministry says more than 500 people sought treatment after the blasts and that 34 of them were hospitalized.
snip
Dragnet2 just posted this from JPL on one of the newer threads.
So if this object had entered vertically instead of at a shallow angle, it’s possible it wouldn’t not have broken up and could have essentially destroyed a city of over 1 million people, Chelyabinsk:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-061
February 15, 2013
Preliminary information indicates that a fireball in Chelyabinsk, Russia, is not related to asteroid 2012 DA14, which is flying by Earth safely today.
The Russian fireball is the largest reported since 1908, when a fireball hit Tunguska, Siberia. The fireball entered the atmosphere at about 40,000 mph (18 kilometers per second). The impact time was 7:20:26 p.m. PST, or 10:20:26 p.m. EST on Feb. 14 (3:20:26 UTC on Feb. 15), and the energy released by the impact was in the hundreds of kilotons.
Based on the duration of the event, it was a very shallow entry. It was larger than the fireball over Indonesia on Oct. 8, 2009. Measurements are still coming in, and a more precise measure of the energy may be available later. The size of the object before hitting the atmosphere was about 49 feet (15 meters) and had a mass of about 7,000 tons.
The fireball, which was about one-third the diameter of asteroid 2012 DA14, was brighter than the sun. Its trail was visible for about 30 seconds, so it was a grazing impact through the atmosphere.
It is important to note that this estimate is preliminary, and may be revised as more data is obtained.
Checked the first 50 comments, did not see this link. It has several videos, one with the sound of the sonic boom, also photos from Russia and close to 8,000 comments.
I BLAME THE _RESIDENT!
It's perfectly understandable. Putin is not going to kick Obama out of the White House; he has no reason to. But those pesky citizens - in Alabama, or in Utah, or in other states - can do that, and they are itching to. So they are the main concern.
Wow... thanks for the info. So glad it didn’t. That city was a big nuclear industrial area back in the cold war. Glad the impacts didn’t hit some of the waste storage said to be there, either.
This site has a good blow by blow.
http://rt.com/news/russia-meteor-meteorite-asteroid-chelyabinsk-291/
One of the current Russian ICBM silo fields is sort-of near there, as well.
Yes way!! The Russians had a rocky start to their morning.
Stunning vids on the internet.
All the eyes in the skies are pointed at us.
I'm sure some idiot will say that because our atmosphere has been weakened by global warming, it allowed this meteor to get through instead of disintegrating upon entry.
Maybe they should change the name of it to Galaxy Warming.
Thanks for the pings 444 : ). Incredible pics at the Daily Mail. A Meteor like this reminds us just how relatively powerless we are. Thank goodness we have Christ with us! Should the number of these type of events ( like this one) increase, I hope it will seriously nudge some to get right with God.
But, it is quite amazing to see the power of these things, I’m glad no one was seriously injured, quite a miracle considering the damage.
Eyew. I didn’t know that.
Wow...that is totally cool.
It’s neat how the crater became so obvious from the air once Hydro-Quebec constructed the series of dams along the Manicouagan and Outardes Rivers to form the reservoir. I think it took more than ten years to complete that whole project.
I had never seen this one before. Thank you for posting the picture!
:-)
Now they’re saying this was part of a meteor shower and several other meteors caused explosions, though not as big as the the main one.
Wow. I don’t think we’d be talking minor injuries if something like that had hit in Russia.
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