Russia showered by 'meteorite rain'

[MrNetworker]

January 15, 2013 – Stuff
LATEST: A meteor streaked across the sky over Russia's Ural Mountains on Friday morning, causing sharp explosions and reportedly injuring around 100 people.

Fragments of the meteor fell in a thinly populated area of the Chelyabinsk region, the Emergency Ministry said in a statement, causing flashes in the morning sky (local time) as well as the explosions.

Interior Ministry spokesman Vadim Kolesnikov said 102 people had called for medical assistance following the incident, mostly for treatment of injuries from glass broken by the explosions.

Kolsenikov also said about 600 square meters of a roof at a zinc factory had collapsed.

Reports conflicted on what exactly happened in the clear skies. A spokeswoman for the Emergency Ministry, Irina Rossius, told The Associated Press that there was a meteor shower, but another ministry spokeswoman, Elena Smirnikh, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying it was a single meteorite. One official described the incident as 'meteorite rain'.

Russian news agencies cited unnamed sources as saying several people were injured at a school in a thinly populated part of the region, which is on the eastern edge of the Ural Mountains.

The ministry said some fragments fell near the town of Satka, about 200 kilometers  from the regional capital city of Chelyabinsk.

"It was definitely not a plane," an emergency official told Reuters, without elaborating.

A Reuters witness in Chelyabinsk reported hearing a huge blast early in the morning and feeling a shockwave in a 19-storey building in the town center.

The sounds of car alarms and breaking windows could be heard in the area, the witness said, and mobile phones were working intermittently.

"Preliminary indications are that it was a meteorite rain," an emergency official told RIA-Novosti. "We have information about a blast at 10,000-meter  altitude. It is being verified."

The trace from a falling object could be seen in Yekaterinburg, some 200 kilometers southeast of Chelyabinsk, another Reuters witness said.

Video footage of the meteorite rain has been posted on YouTube.

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[MrNetworker]

Video of Shockwaves.

[Deano]

WOW.

[Mark]

February 15, 2013 – SIBERIA - Bright objects, tentatively identified as fragments of a meteorite, streaked through the sky in western Siberia early on Friday, accompanied by a boom that damaged buildings across a vast swath of territory. Around 500 people were reported to have been injured, most from breaking glass. Emergency officials had reported no deaths by Friday afternoon but said that 14 people had been hospitalized. Yelena Smirnykh, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Emergency Situations, told Ekho Moskvy radio that she believed the meteorite broke apart and fell in several places. Another government expert, who spoke to Moscow FM radio station, said he believed it may have been a bolide, a type of fireball meteor that explodes in the earth’s atmosphere because of its composition or angle of entry and can be observed from the ground. However, the governor of the Chelyabinsk district reported that a search team had found an impact crater on the outskirts of a city about 50 miles west of Chelyabinsk, which would indicate the meteor did not explode in the atmosphere. An official from the Interior Ministry told Interfax that three large pieces of meteorite debris had been retrieved in the area and that 10,000 police officers are searching for more. A small asteroid, known as 2012 DA14, is expected to pass close to earth later on Friday, NASA reported on its Web site. It was not clear whether the meteorite event in the Ural Mountains was in anyway related. Video clips from the city of Chelyabinsk showed an early morning sky illuminated by a brilliant flash, followed by the sound of breaking glass and multiple car alarms. Meteorites typically cause sonic booms as they enter the earth’s atmosphere. On Friday, the force was powerful enough to shatter dishes and televisions in people’s homes. “I saw a flash in the window, turned toward it and saw a burning cloud, which was surrounded by smoke and was going downward – it reminded me of what you see after an explosion,” said Maria Polyakova, 25, head of reception at the Park-City Hotel in Chelyabinsk, which is 950 miles east of Moscow. A video made outside a building in Chelyabinsk captured the astonished voices of witnesses who were uncertain what it was they had just seen. “Maybe it was a rocket,” said one man, who rushed outside onto the street along with his co-workers when the object hit, far out of sight. A man named Artyom, who spoke to the Moscow FM radio station, said the explosion was enormous. “I was sitting at work and the windows lit up and it was as if the whole city was illuminated, and I looked out and saw a huge streak in the sky and it was like that for two or three minutes and then I heard these noises, like claps,” he said. “And then all the dogs started barking.” He said that there was a blast that caused balconies to shake and windows to shatter. He said he did not believe it was a meteorite. “We are waiting for a second piece, that is what people are talking about now,” he said. There were reports that falling objects were visible as far away as Yekaterinburg, 125 miles southeast of Chelyabinsk. The government response on Friday was huge. Seven airplanes were deployed to search for places where meteorites might have fallen and more than 20,000 people dispatched to comb the area on foot, according to the Ministry of Emergency Situations. There were also 28 sites designated to monitor radiation. No unusual readings had been detected, the ministry reported. The area around Chelyabinsk is also home to “dozens of defense factories, including nuclear factories and those involved in production of thermonuclear weapons,” said Vladimir Lipunov, an astrophysicist at the Shternberg State Astronomy Institute. –NY Times

[Weather Display]

Preliminary information indicates that a meteor in Chelyabinsk, Russia, is not related to asteroid 2012 DA14, which is flying by Earth safely today.

The Russia meteor is the largest reported since 1908, when a meteor hit Tunguska, Siberia. The meteor 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 meteor 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 meteor, 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.

DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

[gabba]

Here's some more videos here. There are some good ones of the sonic boom:

http://gizmodo.com/5984476/meteorite-explodes-over-russia-panic-spreads-updating-live

and here’s the Russian Meteor Entering Earth from Space

http://gizmodo.com/5984583/heres-the-russian-meteor-entering-earth-from-space

[Mark]

By GAUTAM NAIK and ALAN CULLISON

The meteor that crashed to earth in Russia was about 55 feet in diameter, weighed around 10,000 tons and was made from a stony material, scientists said, making it the largest such object to hit the Earth in more than a century.

Large pieces of it have yet to be found. However, a team from Ural Federal University, which is based in Yekaterinburg, collected 53 fragments, the largest of which was 7 millimeters, according to Viktor Grokhovsky, a scientist at the university.

Data from a global network of sensors indicated that the meteor's fiery disintegration as it neared earth near Chelyabinsk, Russia, unleashed nearly 500 kilotons of energy, more than 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

It is the largest reported meteor since the one that hit Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The U.S. agency's new estimate of the meteor's size was a marked increase from its initial one.

"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years," said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office. "When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones."

A meteor is what is seen burning up flying through the atmosphere. A meteorite is what survives the plunge and lands on the earth's surface.
 
When a meteor lands, researchers can get a better fix about its size and composition by studying isotopes found in the fragments. But the pieces need to be found quickly because the isotopes last for only days or weeks.

The search was hampered, Dr. Grokhovsky said, by officials of Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry, which sealed off the area around an 25-foot-wide hole in the ice of Lake Chebarkul, near Chelyabinsk, where a chunk was believed to have fallen. Ministry divers didn't find anything in the lake.

A top regional official told Russia's Interfax news agency that the hole appeared there for another reason and wasn't caused by the meteor. "They just don't know what they are looking for," said Dr. Grokhovsky.
 
Dr. Grokhovsky said that although the meteorite exploded, there are certainly chunks larger than those so far recovered. The black and brown fragments have been fairly easy to spot because they stand out against the snow.

As space visitors go, the meteor wasn't especially exotic. It was of a variety known as ordinary chondrites, which make up most meteorites found on Earth. But it is still of scientific interest.

"Each meteorite is a time capsule and space probe recording the history of our solar system from 4.5 billion years ago," said Caroline Smith, curator of meteorites at London's Natural History Museum. "Whenever you get a new meteorite, you never know what you'll find."

Some of the more intriguing meteorites are partly composed of carbon-based materials, including amino acids and sugars. "The early Earth could well have been seeded with the chemical building blocks you need for life to start," said Dr. Smith.

In addition, scientists have found about 100 meteorites that originated on the moon, and an additional 100 that originated on Mars.

These were formed when an asteroid or comet smacked into the lunar or Martian surface and threw out debris that fell into Earth's gravitational grasp.

By comparison, meteors of the type that hit Russia originate at the earliest reaches of time in the disk of gas and dust that swirled around the early sun. They become denizens of the asteroid belt found between Mars and Jupiter until they fall out of orbit, possibly after a collision.

Some fly near Earth, get pulled in by gravity and meet their end in a blaze of heat and light as they fall toward the ground.
 
Write to Gautam Naik at gautam.naik@wsj.com and Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com
 
A version of this article appeared February 18, 2013, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Search Is on for Meteorite.