Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

This morning, at approximately 5:20 GMT, a meteor of a yet undertermined size crashed in the vicinity of the Russian town of Chebarkul, sending a shock wave that blew out windows in the region. At the present time, over 500 people are reported to have varying injuries, with up to 11 requiring treatment at hospitals.

This is unusual, since there are systems in place to warn of these incidents to allow evacuation of the predicted impact sites. There's no explanation yet as to why this system failed, but some believe that the meteor was shadowed by the sun, rendering the system useless.

Source BBC News - Meteor strike injures hundreds in central Russia

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

Surreal! Here's a good one:


What system are you talking about? Isn't it infeasible to track every meteorite? My assumption is that there's too much area to cover to pick out every 10 ton black rock on a black background.

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

Meteors can have their courses changed very easily, making them very hard to track. What you were tracking a day ago could be completely lost if it passes by another object in space. It's very easy for one to sneak close to Earth undetected. I think that's the way we plan on "moving" them as well, launch something at them and it will slowly move it away from Earth because of the gravitational pull.

I thought the noise in that video was cool, it was like an explosion but it sounded like the way the world would end. =p

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

You're both right, there are no such systems. Few near Earth objects are tracked relative to how many exist.

Very awesome though! It's extremely rare that such a strike happens in anything resembling a densely populated area!

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

Never mind my earlier comment, I was going on undocumented information, my bad

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

When you cover over one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, you're gonna get meteors.

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

Apparently objects under a certain size are undetectable, and could come at any time. There are systems in place to detect the larger ones, but the smaller ones seem to get lost easily. Most of the time, it isn't a problem. Most of the time, the objects either burn up in the atmosphere or fall into the ocean/unpopulated areas. Whether or not this particular one was under the easily traceable size, I don't know. I haven't read into it enough.



Comment which is slightly related to this topic:
Wonder if it is higher in other places of the world...

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

This is the crater the meteorite left.

http://www.popdecay.com/wp-content/u...helyabinsk.jpg

It gives you an appreciation of physics that arguably a relatively small object was able to create such a significant shockwave.

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

Holy shit, really? I mean, I heard that what shattered the glass was the shockwave, but I didn't expect a hole that small! The shockwave seems disproportionate to the hole in the ground to me. Then again, I don't remember much of what I learned about physics...


Hmmm... I wonder what it would look like if it had fallen into a building. Perhaps it would look more devastating.

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

It was moving ~30km/s. That's an insane amount of energy. The infamous "they" said it released ~500 kilotons (TNT equivalent).

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

Supposedly it blew itself apart something like 15 miles up with the force of a small nuke, and that [the ice hole] is just the largest fragment they suspect.

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

we havent had a meteor hit us in years though right? =/

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

Space punches the Earth (its atmosphere anyway) pretty much everyday. What's rare is a (relatively) large one hitting the ground, and rarer still hitting a populated area.

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

Most of the time we don't see them considering most of the planet has oceans and there are large swaths of land that aren't populated.

In the summer of 2010, my father and I actually saw a large asteroid, a near-miss, fly over the planet. I looked for reports on it and saw nothing. I even went on JPL's page to see if they knew anything to no avail. They gave me an answer along the lines of it being a satellite or something.

So it's not only down to the uninhabited areas, humans don't pay attention enough to space as it is.

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

We don't keep an active watch of the skies. Which considering how little storage and processing power cost these days is absolutely INSANE if you ask me. (Not that anyone did but =p)

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

Nem, how would you describe humans not watching the skies? :p

Re: Meteor crashes in Russia; Injures hundreds
 

The last significant impact was, coincidentally, also in Russia, known as the Tunguska Event that took place in June of 1908. It was much larger than this one, but it came down in an uninhabitated region of Russia. The first pictures of the event were taken nearly 20 years later in 1927, but it was clearly a powerful event as it destroyed the forest it landed in.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...d/Tunguska.png