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Trajectory apparently began in near-Earth asteroid group ApolloAstroboffins have figured out where the Chelaybinsk meteorite came from using the power of maths and videos shot by witnesses in Russia.Click here for VideoJorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin of the University of Antioquia in Colombia have come up with a preliminary reconstruction of the orbit of the meteor, which smashed into the city in the Urals completely unexpectedly two weeks ago. By combing through the witness videos and using trigonometry, the astronomers have determined that the meteorite came from the Apollo class of asteroids in our Solar System's space rock belt. The...

Poring over crowd-sourced footage, researchers Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin from the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia, were able to use "simple trigonometry to calculate the height, speed, and position of the rock as it fell to Earth," says BBC News. More importantly, the duo was able to find out where Russia's most famous meteor was likely born. Using astronomy software developed by the U.S. Naval Observatory, Zuluaga and Ferrin gathered enough data to trace the meteoroid's origins in outer space. The information included the meteor's relative angle to the horizon, the shadows it cast, and video timestamps of...

Current and planned efforts focus on larger objects Scientists have begun piecing together the characteristics of the meteor that exploded over Russia on the morning of February 15, using data from seismic instruments that track earthquakes and microphones designed to detect sonic booms from nuclear explosions. Unlike the asteroid DA14, which narrowly but predictably missed Earth later that day, the meteor was too small to detect before its contrail appeared in the dawn skies over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. Yet even an object too small to detect can produce an impressive amount of destruction. The meteor was 15 meters...