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Huge Meteor Blazes Across Sky Over Russia; Hundreds Injured
New submitter dovf writes "The Bad Astronomer analyzes incoming reports about the apparent meteoric fireball over Russia: 'Apparently, at about 09:30 local time, a very big meteor burned up over Chelyabinsk, a city in Russia just east of the Ural mountains, and about 1500 kilometers east of Moscow. The fireball was incredibly bright, rivaling the Sun! There was a pretty big sonic boom from the fireball, which set off car alarms and shattered windows. I'm seeing some reports of many people injured (by shattered glass blown out by the shock wave). I'm also seeing reports that some pieces have fallen to the ground, but again as I write this those are unconfirmed." This is the best summary I've found so far, and links to lots of videos and images. He also clarifies something I've been wondering about: 'This is almost certainly unrelated to the asteroid 2012 DA14 that will pass on Friday.'"
Could that have just been a smaller chunk that broke off of the DA14? I mean that is tomorrow. Sounds possible to me.
Awesome video, a lot of freaked out people over there! The flash of light and the shock wave had a bunch of folks crapping their pants. Also reports of about 500 being injured.
As of right now, English-language sources seem to be a bit behind on the injury/damage reports.
The current reports from the city government say that 725 people have received medical attention, with 31 being hospitalized. Infrastructural damage amounts to problems in the centralized building heating system, and blown out windows in about 3000 apartment buildings, 34 hospitals and clinics, and 361 schools/daycares. I should note that, this being Russia, blown out windows are a serious matter because they render the buildings cold, especially coupled with heating system problems. Gas supply has been turned off in parts of the city as a precaution.
Overall, though, there appears to be no serious damage - though emergency repairs and lots of new windows are needed.
... hows your space program going.
And another one will smash in to another country somewhere, and another, and another, then Paris gets wiped off the face of the Earth.
Damn you Hollywoooooood!
Some not so credible newspapers report unconfirmed military sources stating that Russian air defence shot down this bad boy.
Pfffft.
That was Putin skydiving from space.
Shirtless, because he's Putin.
http://www.standartnews.com/videos/watch/meteorit_padna_i_rani_desetki_v_rusiya-276.html
Here's a link with video from more places. (Best i've found so far)
Any pictures of the crash site? How far away was it from the city?
Zombies spotted in Chelyabinsk
As I understood this asteroid came from a different direction than 2012 DA14, so that is why it is said that it is probably unrelated.
Still, I can't believe this. There is an asteroid passing very close to Earth, and on the same day we have this impact with hundreds of injuries. These are both very rare events, so it seems unlikely that they are unrelated. Maybe the orbits of both asteroids were linked somehow?
The meteorite was several times larger than the last (and first ever) predicted impact in 2008.
It is trivially possible these days, to do several complete surveys of the sky each day and ensure that such asteroids are discovered several days ahead of time. Computers allow us do evaluate the data more or less in real time. The problem is: You need funding for the telescopes around the world and staff to run them.
While all the observatories would do, is to give warning to people in the area to stay indoors and away from windows - or leave the area alltogether if the rock is a bit larger - that's still better than "oups" and a couple videos from dashboard cameras. It would also provide a viable basis for sending up a rocket with a few tons of mass to break up an asteroid into harmless chunks. Possibly a combination of high and low density materials, like concrete and lead, to achieve a good distribution of the momentum through the whole asteroid.
I'm not kidding. A single ton mass in a head-on collision with 10-15km/s has as much kinetic energy as 15-30 tons of high explosives. Which should be enough to break up a 30m asteroid into very small chunks (this one in russia was probably around 10m), although some preparation is certainly in order.
I wonder how many stared at that thing and were waiting for the giant mushroom cloud to appear. Like Sarah Connor at the playground.
Selling an apartment in Chelyabinsk! URGENT!!! Call to 23-25 ask for Sergey
2 b | ! 2 b
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eumetsat/8474853633/
"An image from the SEVIRI instrument aboard our Meteosat-10 geostationary satellite. The vapour trail left by the meteor that was seen near Chelyabinsk in Russia on 15th February 2013 is visible in the centre of the image."
www.rdex.net
No, the world surely would not have ended. We know for a fact that meteorite impacts have been observed by satellites designed to warn against nuclear weapons. The first few scared the shit out of operators, because the energy released by such meteorites is on the order of several kilotons. But neither Russians nor Americans were stupid.
Especially so when I am reading reports of people intentionally smashing in windows in hope of compensation. Ahhh, sneaky f*ckin' Russians!
Buuuuullshit, AC , that's a video of The Door To Hell, near a village in Turkmanistan called Derweze
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_to_Hell
Nope, that's actually the "Gates of Hell" in Turkmenistan. http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-gates-of-hell
www.rdex.net
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCawTYPtehk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0cRHsApzt8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3BGn012dhw
Warning: strong language.
Hah. I saw that video and thought for sure it was the impact site of the meteor. Never heard of the Door to Hell. Had me fooled.
I wonder how many saw this coming and dove for cover. It doesn't take much to keep your skin from getting a flash burn. And for God's sake look away.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Here: http://en.rian.ru/russia/20130215/179481049/Meteorite-Shower-Hits-Russia-Kazakhstan.html
Meteors are not predominantly made of ice.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
No. Nuclear bombs don't produce a fireball streaking across the sky. The lack of radiation is also a big clue. Nuclear weapons are designed to kill, not frighten people and shatter windows. You'd have to be pretty insane to confuse this for a nuclear attack.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I don't get it. Break a window so that you can get - a new window. Are they that desperate for visitors out there?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
No, they're made of iron that survives uncontrolled re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
Woot!
First Tunguska, now this. Some folks are just lucky.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
What do our new overlords look like? Are they friendly or have they enslaved you and are using your liquefied remains as fuel for their machines of war? Should I panic now, or can I wait until after lunch?
Wait, how am I going to know that your response is really from you, and not from one of your new overlords impersonating you? I think it's safest if just start panicking now; just as soon as I'm done checking the other /. articles....
If I learned anything from watching Stargate SG-1, it's that everything that happens in space is explained as "a meteor."
In Soviet Russia, asteroids play YOU!
I am officially gone from
You're "reading" this on Fox, I presume.
Not so totally unrelated to the article, the meteor strike wasn't too far from one of the biggest nuclear facilities in the Russian Federation.
Mayak
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Meteors and ICMBs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles) both travel on "ballistic" trajectories. I.E. when they're coming down, they don't change speed or course under their own power. This makes it very easy (relatively, for people that do it for a living) to track their point of origin. This would clearly be coming from space, not from another continent.
What interests me the most here is why wasn't this all over the news? We see posts about twice a year talking about the next "near miss" we're going to have. So what happened with this one? Didn't they catch it? Or did they catch it, realize it was going to hit, and decide not to tell anybody? It would be a lot more interesting to find out details on it being known, covered up, and an intercept attempted. (and possibly successfully)
Continuing on that tangent, hollywood tells us from Independence Day "and turn one dangerous falling object into many?" In other words, blowing it up doesn't immediately lower it's total combined mass, so is it a good idea or a bad idea? I suppose if you start with something massive enough to get through the atmosphere and hit dirt, if you have a chance to blow it up into say a dozen smaller pieces that have a good chance of burning up in the atmosphere, that'd be a good option. Even if you busted it up it up into say four smaller pieces, their surface area to mass ratio goes way up and the four that make it to the ground should have burned off more mass and impact with less energy than the original one would have.
But rather than trying to play an armchair quarterback, I'm just askin' the questions, I'll leave answering those questions to the "rocket scientists".
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
There are four types of meteor composition; roughly ice, carbon, stone, iron. These types notably differ in how deep they can get into the atmosphere before they shatter (explode), with shatter altitude varying mostly by size. Iron meteors generally get all the way to the surface intact. And any part that hits the ground counts as a meteorite.
T. M. Pederson
"Lies, Damn Lies, and Documentation"
Gentlemen, the Hammer has fallen.
do the math.. a 1000 miles away (radius) equates 3,141,590 sq miles to track
for something that occurs in 30 seconds... and has a cross section of a few feet.
here is a nice 1000 mile circle
http://reyscars.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/1000-mile-radius-map.jpg
examine that entire region for a speck about 20-50 feet wide....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Of course it's too early to say, but i think that is a not surprise we could not detect a 20-30m (10ton) object coming our way, especially now that all eyes are on 2012DA14. Object was too small and too quick and came from the 'wrong' direction. And yes, the answer is increase our early warning budget and seriously work out a planetary protection system, or next time Tunguska2 can be knocking at the door of some populated area for a change (or worse, on the continental shelf, so the tsunami can hit multiple locations).
No, they're made of iron that survives uncontrolled re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
No. most are made of stones that accreted from dust particles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chondrite
It's just iron meteors are much more likely to survive to the surface then chondrites. Stony meteors tend to explode in the atmosphere, like we saw today.
In Soviet Russia
Meteor land on YOU!
Bruce Willis would have stopped this.
Depends what day it occurred on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_missile_crisis
Something like this can get easily misinterpreted.
Actually, most of them are essentially rocks. Iron meteorites or combinations of stone and a significant percentage of iron only make up around 6% of all meteorites.
Break a crappy old window that doesn't fit it's frame and has a draught all the way around the edge, get a new piece of glass that fits? Bargain.
"There's nothing random or light about this, someone made a mistake!"
It's not like space is famously chock full of rocks or anything like that.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
No, they're made of iron that survives uncontrolled re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
Something that never left cannot reenter.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
You're sure that was a Russian interceptor missile that hit it?
I imagine it was shot down by an ancient meteor defence facility left behind when the reptoids retreated to their underground lairs.
I have a vivid imagination.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
even worse, its ready made space artillery.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Starship design optimises for minimum mass (mass, material choice), maximum available space (size), and optimum use thereof (shape). With an asteroid you have no control over material, are bounded in size and shape, and the minimum mass is achieved by sculpting out the shape of a conventional starship.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Re-entry vehicles from ICBMs do.
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
According to three of the articles I read the paths (vectors) of the inbound meteors are very different.
Stop the hysteria and read before you start freaking out.
Even supposing there was a compensation scheme giving out free windows - and there isn't AFAIK - I'm not sure that most people would put up with having unheatable room in Russian in the winter for an indeterminate amount of time, just for the sake of a free pane of glass.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Not likely. DA14 is a few hours away and moving very fast... which means that it's still very far away.
If the basic orbit is similar, this is not only possible but probable. Could well be that DA14 is just the largest part of something that has broken up much earlier and there are smaller pieces that have spread apart in all directions quite a bit now.
Isn't this how Day of the Triffids started?
So, what was it? Nobody has yet to explain WHAT it was and WHERE it came from if it is UNRELATED.
It was a meteor. It came from space.
... I have to ask, why? Why would someone just decide to remove the video?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Pazjalusta ! A great opportunity to study the broken window fallacy in a post-communist economic context.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Buy more guns.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Starship design optimises for minimum mass (mass, material choice), maximum available space (size), and optimum use thereof (shape). With an asteroid you have no control over material, are bounded in size and shape, and the minimum mass is achieved by sculpting out the shape of a conventional starship.
You mean *our* proposed starship designs, and mostly because of our technological level, and how fleeting our lives are, such that we have this unreasonable desire to travel at relativistic speeds so that we can get places within our lifetimes. A group mind, or inherited memories, or just plain better longevity, would render the speed issues moot for any form of interstellar travel: "Gentlebeings, please return your tray tables to their upright, locked position; the pilot indicates we will be landing in only another 15,000 years". A tech level that is one above ours on the Kardashev scale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) would have no problem flinging a bunch of its people on a 100,000 year journey on a giant rock.
Note that I do not believe that this is a case of aliens, only that the parent is offering rather humanocentric arguments against it. My personal opinion here is based on Occam's razor: a meteor is the simplest explanation which fits the observed facts, as reported so far.
He will defy their gravity. His dense molecular structure will make him strong. He'll be fast. Virtually invulnerable.
I also don't see much difference in a missle blowing up the asteroid and the atmosphere or land destroying the asteroid. In both case your going to have a shockwave. You would have to destroy it in space to minimize damage.
I don't care what tech level you're at or what you look like: there's still an m in the kinetic energy equation. Whatever your transportation goals are, they get more difficult the heavier your vehicle is.
It seems unlikely that nobody couldn't predict its downfall (it had to be rather larger to be visible).
Another possible scenario is a retired spy satellite.
And nickel.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Almost twice the size of each of the next five countries on the list - except Brazil and Australia. It's MORE than twice the size of those countries. And Australia is a continent.
Or try it like this. On one side of the country, in Europe, Russia borders countries like Norway and Finland - on the other side, in Asia, it borders Japan.
And on top of that, it also borders USA (Alaska) across the Bering Strait.
Russia is really, REALLY big. Lot's of space to catch nearly anything that falls into northern hemisphere.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
There are several videos on youtube now of people filming the clouds and then the explosion (assuming sonic boom). Why did the boom take place so much later? At the speed of sound, even a sonic boom 30 miles away would only take a few seconds correct?
Apparently Space Jesus hates Russia and communists. I'll be interested to hear Pat Robertson's comments.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I don't care what tech level you're at or what you look like: there's still an m in the kinetic energy equation. Whatever your transportation goals are, they get more difficult the heavier your vehicle is.
Perhaps they've found some way to produce energy from mass.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I believe this is the video you are referring to?
Those Russian drivers dont seem to be fazed by anything..
In case anyone wondered why this was so well documented by dashcam, most Russian drivers have them solely for documentation of
1) murderously shitty drivers
2) attempted burglaries & kidnappings
3) crooked cops demanding bribes.
Most definitely not in that order.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpXTOB40JCg
compilation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn_xtmdyB48
school evacuation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjfoYW75u_Y
but are you managing those temperatures with big holes where your windows used to be? will you have your windows wide open at midnight tonight?
sure, if the aliens are super advanced, adhering to known laws of physics, but at the same super lazy on shaving time from their thousand year trip to unknown destination(having reserves in that case is always a good idea unless you're just going there for a ritual suicide).
kardashev scale is a bunch of bullshit. which isn't surprising since it's used for grading fantasies in regards to each other (is Q or the Dr more powerful and advanced???? who the fuck cares they've both dealt the do-anything-anytime-anyhow cards).
btw there's been plenty of "designs" about using asteroids as space ships, so it's been on potential designs tables. but even in scifi that design needs the magic card to be even somewhat smart way of going about things.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
And for all you non-Russian speakers: almost nothing of the driver's commentary may be possibly printed in a newspaper.
There are things other than glass that can be used to keep the heat in while the glass is not there.
As a Russian, regardless of where he's reading it, I can certainly believe it - although I'd expect it to be a few isolated cases.
We could have used that death star.
Have gnu, will travel.
Right now, without further delay we need to make sure that the worlds population of truck drivers, harley-davidson owners and oil well roughnecks are ready to spring into action to save us all.
Oh, and make sure Aerosmith in on speed-dial.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Man, that is a long exposure photograph, intended to emphasize the luminosity of the reentry vehicles. Useful, that is, for marketing purposes, for wartime target estimation... not so much.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Right, nothing like the lootin' and shootin' in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina.