Feb. 15, 2013 (TSR) – With a blinding flash and a booming shock wave, a meteor blazed across the sky over Russia’s Ural Mountains region Friday and exploded with the force of an atomic bomb, injuring more than 1,000 people as it blasted out windows and spread panic in a city of 1 million.
While NASA estimated the meteor was only about the size of a bus and weighed about 7,000 tons, the fireball it produced was dramatic. Video shot by startled residents of the city of Chelyabinsk showed its streaming contrails arcing toward the horizon just after sunrise, looking like something from a world-ending science-fiction movie.
It came hours before a 150-foot asteroid passed within about 17,000 miles (28,000 kilometers) of Earth. The European Space Agency said its experts had determined there was no connection between the asteroid and the Russian meteor – just cosmic coincidence.
The meteor over Russia entered the Earth’s atmosphere about 9:20 a.m. local time (10:20 p.m. EST Thursday) at a hypersonic speed of at least 33,000 mph (54,000 kph) and shattered into pieces about 30-50 kilometers (18-32 miles) high, the Russian Academy of Sciences said. NASA estimated its speed at about 40,000 mph and the energy released in the hundreds of kilotons.
“There was panic. People had no idea what was happening,” said Sergey Hametov of Chelyabinsk, about 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) 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.
The shock wave blew in an estimated 100,000 square meters (more than 1 million square feet) of glass, according to city officials, who said 3,000 buildings in Chelyabinsk were damaged. At a zinc factory, part of the roof collapsed.
The Interior Ministry said about 1,100 people sought medical care after the shock wave and 48 were hospitalized. Most of the injuries were caused by flying glass, officials said.
Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Vladimir Purgin said many of the injured were cut as they flocked to windows to see what caused the intense flash of light, which momentarily was brighter than the sun.
There was no immediate word on any deaths or anyone struck by space fragments.
President Vladimir Putin summoned the nation’s emergencies minister and ordered immediate repairs. “We need to think how to help the people and do it immediately,” he said.
Some meteorite fragments fell in a reservoir outside the town of Chebarkul, the regional Interior Ministry office said. The crash left an eight-meter (26-foot) crater in the ice.
Lessons had just started at Chelyabinsk schools when the meteor exploded, and officials said 258 children were among those injured. Amateur video showed a teacher speaking to her class as a powerful shock wave hit the room.
Yekaterina Melikhova, a high school student whose nose was bloody and whose upper lip was covered with a bandage, said she was in her geography class when a bright light flashed outside.
“After the flash, nothing happened for about three minutes. Then we rushed outdoors. … The door was made of glass, a shock wave made it hit us,” she said.
Russian television ran video of athletes at a city sports arena who were showered by shards of glass from huge windows. Some of them were still bleeding.
Other videos showed a long shard of glass slamming into the floor close to a factory worker and massive doors blown away by the shock wave.
“According to preliminary estimates, this space object is of non-technogenic origin and qualifies as a meteorite. It was moving at a low trajectory with a speed of about 30 km/s.” (Image: Meteosat 9)
Meteors typically cause sizeable sonic booms when they enter the atmosphere because they are traveling so much faster than the speed of sound. Injuries on the scale reported Friday, however, are extraordinarily rare.
“I went to see what that flash in the sky was about,” recalled resident Marat Lobkovsky. “And then the window glass shattered, bouncing back on me. My beard was cut open, but not deep. They patched me up. It’s OK now.”
Another resident, Valya Kazakov, said some elderly women in his neighborhood started crying out that the world was ending.
The many broken windows exposed residents to the bitter cold as temperatures in the city were expected to plummet to minus 20 Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit) overnight. The regional governor put out a call for any workers who knew how to repair windows.
Russian-language hashtags for the meteorite quickly shot up into Twitter’s top trends.
“Jeez, I just woke up because my bed started shaking! The whole house is moving!” tweeted Alisa Malkova.
Social media was flooded with video from the many dashboard cameras that Russians mount in their cars, in case of pressure from corrupt traffic police or a dispute after an accident.
The dramatic event 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 his vehement statements, blamed the Americans.
“It’s not meteors falling. It’s the test of a new weapon by the Americans,” the RIA Novosti news agency quoted him as saying.
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.
Meteroids are small pieces of space debris – usually parts of comets or asteroids – that are on a collision course with the Earth. They become meteors when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Most meteors burn up in the atmosphere, but if they survive the frictional heating and strike the surface of the Earth they are called meteorites.
NASA said the Russian fireball was the largest reported since 1908, when a meteor hit Tunguska, Siberia, and flattened an estimated 80 million trees. Chelyabinsk is about 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles) west of Tunguska. The Tunguska blast, attributed to a comet or asteroid fragment, is generally estimated to have been about 10 megatons.
Scientists believe that a far larger meteorite strike on what today is Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula may have been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. According to that theory, the impact would have thrown up vast amounts of dust that blanketed the sky for decades and altered the climate on Earth.
The 150-foot space rock that safely hurtled past Earth on Friday was dubbed Asteroid 2012 DA14.
The asteroid was invisible to astronomers in the United States at the time of its closest approach on the opposite of the world. But in Australia, astronomers used binoculars and telescopes to watch the point of light speed across the clear night sky.
Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary science, called the back-to-back celestial events an amazing display.
“This is indeed very rare and it is historic,” he said on NASA TV. “These fireballs happen about once a day or so, but we just don’t see them because many of them fall over the ocean or in remote areas. ”
Experts said the Russian meteor could have produced much more serious problems in the area hosting nuclear and chemical weapons disposal facilities.
Vladimir Chuprov of Greenpeace Russia said the Russian government has underestimated potential risks of the region. He noted that the meteor struck only 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Mayak nuclear storage and disposal facility, which holds dozens of tons of weapons-grade plutonium.
A chemical weapons disposal facility at Shchuchye also contains some 6,000 tons (5,460 metric tons) of nerve agents, including sarin and VX, about 14 percent of the chemical weapons that Russia is committed to destroy.
The panic and confusion that followed the meteor quickly gave way to typical Russian black humor and entrepreneurial instincts. Several people smashed in the windows of their houses in the hopes of receiving compensation, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
Others quickly took to the Internet and put what they said were meteorite fragments up for sale.
One of the most popular jokes was that the meteorite was supposed to fall on Dec. 21, 2012 – when many believed the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world – but was delivered late by Russia’s notoriously inefficient postal service.
Russia double-checks radiation and water contamination, Military forces deployed
Traces of the meteor shower has been observed in four regions – Sverdlovsk, Tyumen, Kurgan regions and in the Republic of Bashkortostan.
All the world’s observatories and other surveillance systems failed to detect the approach of this meteorite.
“They are difficult to see and, in addition, that astronomers can observe from Earth only during the night, and the thing in general can fly up from the Sun, that is, during the day, so it just does not register in any optical methods we are familiar with,” – said the deputy director of the State Astronomical Sternberg Institute of the Moscow State University (SAI) Sergei Lamzin.
One of the areas where the meteorite hit – in Zlatoust, Chelyabinsk region and two areas – in Chebarkul were checked for radiation and came out normal, nevertheless, the Russian police took these places under protection and restricted access by all outsiders.
Lake Chebarkul was now also cordoned off, and even entry from the coast is inaccessible. The diameter of the crater from the collision of a celestial body with the Earth is about 6 meters.
Samples of water taken from the lake have not revealed any excessive radioactivity or foreign material according to Russia Today.
Later in the afternoon the specialists took samples of the water in Lake Chebarkul, which is the only reservoir in the 1 million-populated city. The thing is that there is a possibility of radiation contamination, and in the morning military divers will be sent. Their task will be to detect and remove all of the water that was left of the heavenly visitor.
“Unfortunately, after this event, with operation of some industrial enterprises, the people suffered and social infrastructure: kindergartens, schools. We need to do everything in order to objectively assess the damage and immediately help people,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin to Russian Channel One.
According to Vladimir Puchkov, the head of the Emergencies Ministry (MOE), they deployed military forces totaling more than 20, 000 people, three thousand pieces of equipment and eight aircrafts, to provide practical help to people who find themselves in the emergency area, and all the issues of life support”..
For its priority, the MOE recommended to suspend Russian enterprises in the area, so that the citizens were able to return home to assess the damage and take steps to protect the thermal circuit due to the fact that the Fireball destroyed a very large amount of glazing panels, and that the temperature of -5 during the day and night is expected to continue.
“The system of energy, transport, communications, aviation, working steadily, exceeding the standards on radiation environment, emission emergency hazardous chemical is not fixed, but we have developed the appropriate mobile groups that monitor the entire emergency area,” according to the MOE.
Puchkov also asked the President to give approval for the flight of the working group of the Government Commission in the area of ??emergency for additional measures and required assistance from the federal government.
“The local regional authorities have to cope, they said. However, your staff departures there will be no more than you need to analyze what happened, and to assess the possible damage that could be caused not only the communications infrastructure, social facilities, and energy . This is extremely important in the winter, so make it as fast as possible, ” President Vladimir Putin responded with the order.
WATCH THE FIREBALL HIT RUSSIA
