1,100 injured when huge meteor explodes over Russia
»Play Video
MOSCOW (AP) - With a blinding flash and a booming shock wave, a meteor blazed across the western Siberian sky Friday and exploded with the force of 20 atomic bombs, 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 an estimated 7,000 tons, the fireball it produced was dramatic. Video shot by startled residents of the city of Chelyabinsk showed its streaming contrails as it arced toward the horizon just after sunrise, looking like something from a world-ending science-fiction movie.
The largest recorded meteor strike in more than a century occurred 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 above western Siberia 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 to 32 miles) high, the Russian Academy of Sciences said. NASA estimated its speed at about 40,000 mph, said it exploded about 12 to 15 miles high, released 300 to 500 kilotons of energy and left a trail 300 miles long.
"There was panic. People had no idea what was happening," said Sergey Hametov of Chelyabinsk, about 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow in the Ural Mountains.
"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.
Scientists estimated the meteor unleashed a force 20 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, although the space rock exploded at a much higher altitude. Amy Mainzer, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the atmosphere acted as a shield.
The shock wave may have shattered windows, but "the atmosphere absorbed the vast majority of that energy," she 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.
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.
Paul Chodas, research scientist at the Near Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that ground telescopes would have needed to point in the right direction at the right time to spot Friday's incoming meteor.
"It would be very faint and difficult to detect, not impossible, but difficult," Chodas said.
The 150-foot space rock that safely hurtled past Earth at 2:25 p.m. EST Friday was dubbed Asteroid 2012 DA14 and was discovered a year ago. It came closer than many communication and weather satellites that orbit 22,300 miles up.
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 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.
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.
While NASA estimated the meteor was only about the size of a bus and weighed an estimated 7,000 tons, the fireball it produced was dramatic. Video shot by startled residents of the city of Chelyabinsk showed its streaming contrails as it arced toward the horizon just after sunrise, looking like something from a world-ending science-fiction movie.
The largest recorded meteor strike in more than a century occurred 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 above western Siberia 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 to 32 miles) high, the Russian Academy of Sciences said. NASA estimated its speed at about 40,000 mph, said it exploded about 12 to 15 miles high, released 300 to 500 kilotons of energy and left a trail 300 miles long.
"There was panic. People had no idea what was happening," said Sergey Hametov of Chelyabinsk, about 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow in the Ural Mountains.
"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.
Scientists estimated the meteor unleashed a force 20 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, although the space rock exploded at a much higher altitude. Amy Mainzer, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the atmosphere acted as a shield.
The shock wave may have shattered windows, but "the atmosphere absorbed the vast majority of that energy," she 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.
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.
Paul Chodas, research scientist at the Near Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that ground telescopes would have needed to point in the right direction at the right time to spot Friday's incoming meteor.
"It would be very faint and difficult to detect, not impossible, but difficult," Chodas said.
The 150-foot space rock that safely hurtled past Earth at 2:25 p.m. EST Friday was dubbed Asteroid 2012 DA14 and was discovered a year ago. It came closer than many communication and weather satellites that orbit 22,300 miles up.
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 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.
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.
All in 24 hrs....One in Cuba and one flew over San Francisco, three in a day?
I was so scared and knew the sky was falling
I'm going to go put some vodka in my juice now.Â
It's Russia somewhere.
Scientist note to another: Ok guys, back to the drawing board. They've figured out our new meteor missile. We need to come up with something else.
I guess it's nice to know the Russians think we are smart enough to come up with a weapon like that. That's a compliment.....right?
Luckily it did not hit Hanford Nuclear Site,or we all history...!
The real question is whether it came from Mongo or Klendathu.
And now, under Chebarkul Lake, it waits......
And just when our attention was being distracted by something 17k plus miles away, entering our atmosphere moving 50k mph, just when nobody was looking...kind of reminds me of that Jackson Brown lyrics "...the Russians escaped when we weren't watching them..." They sure did. This time!
Good time to be in the window replacement business there.
No worries, there are only a trillion trillion more of them out there...
"NASA estimated the meteor was only about the size of a bus and weighed an estimated 7,000 tons"
In terms of asteroids and other space junk, that isn't considered huge. More KOMO exaggeration.
@jowsuf They absolutely missed this one. They did not see it. I am sure there are more of those around.
This comment has been deleted
It happened on Galileo's birthday. It was the universe's way of saying science is supreme.Â
@Jack60 Jesus said absolutely nothing about gays, period, end of story. . Man has been predicting the end since the beginning. Only God knows when the end will come.
@Jack60Â Scientists predict this kind of stuff, too, and they're usually right about it more often. I think I'll side with the scientists.Â
@Jack60Â Congratulations on being a hate monger. Jesus said "love thy neighbor", but never said except if they are gay, jewish, etc. Keep living in that hypocritical world of yours while the rest of society progresses beyond you. It's fun watching you people in the rearview mirror.
Probably N Korea testing over Russian.... ;)
@Jack60 Not really funny,considering thousands were injured. Imagine that same thing happening over the city of Seattle.
DAMN Nature!! You Scary!!! Awesomeness. We know so little & think we know so much - Stupid Humans!! :)
 I Do Hope however, that no one is seriously injured.
If I saw something like that with that blinding of a flash I would immediately assume it was a nuclear device. I certainly wouldn't have stood out in the open with my phone! I guess the Russians didn't have "duck and cover" training...although I think nowadays people would stand out there taking pictures no matter what country.
@NRasmussen The difference between a single blinding flash of a nuke, vs a long glowing contrail that is rapidly brightening of a meteor is huge. But none-the-less, it just shows you that human nature loves to take a look at what's going on, unless VERY repetitive training tells you to do otherwise.
Well I'm sure that nice little town of Smallville is glad they didn't get hit yet again. ;)
I don't believe in coincidence - cosmic or otherwise
@Alikelystorey What is coincidental about this? This was a 100% observable and explainable event that has happened before.Â
it happens almost daily according to NASA. It just usually happens over the ocean, or in really remote parts of the world.
@Alikelystorey Well, you better get used to cosmic coincidences, because they happen ALL the time. :P
Just like lightening.. the thunder is always way behind the game.. that Russian Top 40 is awesome ;-)
What is it with Russia and meteors?
@ValleyBronco Karma.
@ValleyBronco Probably because Russia is such a huge country, it just has better odds.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW! How wasn't it picked up on radar? I thought the Russians had a space station? (watched Armageddon a countless amount of times) lol
@domthe10 The Russians no longer have their own space station. Mir burned up years ago. There is the ISS but it is not any more equipped to detect this than our ground based visual and radar detection. We only scan a small fraction of the sky at any given time and we are looking for planet-killers, not relatively small objects like this one.
@domthe10 Well, the estimates were that it was only about 6 or 7 feet wide, and it was moving extremely fast.... they would have had to point the radar exactly at the place it was coming from, and even then they might not have detected it. Also, it came from the same direction as the Sun, so it would have been nearly impossible to see even if they knew where to look.
@Sutekh Wow. Thank you!
The estimates state that it was 49 feet prior to entering the atmosphere..
@Mr. H Yes, I based that number on an estimate from earlier in the day.
JPL is saying the blast shock wave was equal to a 300 KT nuclear weapon, about 2X more powerful than a US MIRV warhead on a Polaris missile and about 12X stronger than Nagasaki, about 23X strongest than Hiroshima.
where is the vodka? none of these videos have it.
Bada boom. Big bada boom.Â
@lakeview 5th element. Good flick.
Interesting, I have been slowly seeing reports show up online now about Cuba today having a similar incident with a meteor.http://www.dailypaul.com/274744/report-meteor-crash-in-cuba-breaking
@rightandexact Still not a reliable news outlet with anything about a meteorite in Cuba. I think you're going to have to give up on this one. Unless you're going to claim that Cuban Newspapers like The Havana Tribune and Vanguardia aren't printing major news in their own country for some reason.
Fooey, looks like it did happen in Cuba and in San Fran also.Â
I'll bet there was also a sudden rush on any store selling clean underwear!
This comment has been deleted
This comment has been deleted
@Fooey Patooey! @rightandexact I guess we'll see if it makes it on mainstream media.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Gah... Â missed N. Korea....
@AdAckbar They're probably saying the same thing about Washington DC.Â
@NorthEnd @AdAckbar Actually, I'm surprised North Korea hasn't found some way to take credit.
This like the time they found that alien in Antartica in 1982...