Original

Summary



Galina Zaglumyonova was woken in her flat in central Chelyabinsk by an enormous explosion that blew in the balcony windows and shattered clay pots containing her few houseplants.

When she jumped out of bed on Friday she could see a huge vapour trail hanging in the morning sky and hear the wail of car alarms from the street below.

I didnt understand what was going on, said Zaglumyonova.

There was a big explosion and then a series of little explosions.

My first thought was that it was a plane crash.

What she had actually witnessed were the death throes of a 10tonne meteorite that plunged to Earth in a series of fireballs just after sunrise.

Officials put the number of people injured at almost 1,200, with more than 40 taken to hospitalmost as a result of flying glass shattered by the sonic boom created by the meteorites descent.

There were no reported deaths.

The meteorite entered the atmosphere travelling at a speed of at least 33,000mph and broke up into chunks between 18 and 32 miles above the ground, according to a statement from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The event caused panic in Chelyabinsk, a city of more than 1 million people to the south of Russias Ural mountains, as mobile phone networks swiftly became jammed by the volume of calls.

Amateur video footage from the area, often peppered with the obscene language of frightened observers, showed the chunks of meteorite glowing more brightly as they approached the moment of impact.

The vapour trail was visible for hundreds of miles around, including in neighbouring Kazakhstan.

Tatyana Bets was at work in the reception area of a hospital clinic in the centre of the city when the meteorite struck.

First we noticed the wind, and then the room was filled with a very bright light and we could see a cloud of some unspecified smoke in the sky, she said.

Then, after a few minutes, came the explosions.

At least three craters were subsequently discovered, according to the ministry of the interior, and were being monitored by the military.

One crater was more than six metres wide, while another lump of meteorite was reported to have slammed through the thick ice of a nearby lake.

Radiation levels at the impact sites were normal, according to local military officials, Interfax reported.

In Chelyabinsk itself, schools and universities were closed and many other staff told to go home early.

About 200 children were among the injured.

Zinc prices jumped slightly on the London Metals Exchange after it was reported that a local zinc factory had been particularly badly hit and had suffered damage to its walls and roof.

A steady stream of lightly injured people, most suffering cuts from flying glass, came into the clinic where Bets works.

She said a nearby dormitory building for college students was particularly badly affected and many of the students were brought in suffering from fright.

There were a lot of girls in shock.

Some were very pale and many of them fainted, she said.

Early estimates suggested more than 100,000 square metres of glass had been broken and 3,000 buildings hit.

The total cost of the damage in the city was being valued at in excess of 1 billion roubles 20m.

The meteorite over Chelyabinsk arrived less than a day before asteroid 2012 DA14 was expected to make the closest pass to Earth about 17,510 miles of any recorded cosmic body.

But experts said the two events were linked by nothing more than coincidence.

Rumours and conspiracy theories, however, swirled in the first few hours after the incident.

Reports on Russian state television and in local media suggested that the meteorite was engaged by local air defence units and blown apart at an altitude of more than 15 miles.

The ultranationalist leader of Russias Liberal Democrat party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, said it was not a meteorite but military action by the United States, echoing much of the speculation voiced on amateur film footage.

Its not a meteorite fallingits a test of new American weapons, Zhirinovsky said.

Some were quick to take advantage of the confusion.

Enterprising people were offering lumps of meteorite for sale through internet sites within a few hours of the impact.

President Vladimir Putin and the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, were informed about the incident, and Putin convened a meeting with the head of the emergency situations ministry.

Its proof that not only are economies vulnerable, but the whole planet.

Medvedev said at an economic forum in Siberia, Interfax reported.

Dmitry Rogozin, Russias deputy prime minister and former ambassador to Nato, took to Twitter to call for an international push to create a warning system for all objects of an alien origin.

Neither the US nor Russia had the capability to bring down such objects, he added.

This has been corrected to 20m.

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Almost 500 people hurt as aftershock damages buildings and jammed mobile networks spread panic Footage of the meteorite was seen streaking across the sky above Russias Chelyabinsk region.

WARNING this video contains strong language in Russian.

Source YouTube Link to video Meteor explodes in the sky over Russia.

Almost 1,100 people have been injured after a huge meteorite flared spectacularly in the skies above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

It broke windows, damaged buildings and caused panic as mobile networks overloaded.

Videos from the scene at 923am local time showed objects plunging through the clear morning sky and erupting into enormous fireballs to the sound of multiple explosions.

Long vapour trails were seen hundreds of miles away.

Further footage of the meteorite.

WARNING these videos contain strong language.

I didnt understand what was going on, said Galina Zaglumyonova, who lives in Chelyabinsk, a city of over a million people to the south of the Ural mountains.

There was a big explosion and then a series of little explosionsour first thought was that it was a plane crash, she said.

The alarms of all the cars on the street went off after the loud bangs.

Shockwaves were felt in buildings.

WARNING these videos contain strong language.

The Russian Academy of Sciences estimated that the meteorite weighed about 10 tons and entered the Earths atmosphere at a speed of at least 54,000 kph 33,000 mph, shattering about 3050km 1832 miles above ground.

Russian officials said that they had already found where the main chunk of the meteorite had fallen, on the outskirts the city.

At the last count, 474 people had been injured with over 20 hospitalised, according to Russias emergency situations ministry.

The figure rose throughout the morning and is expected to continue to rise.

Many of those who suffered were hit by flying glass, but there were no reports of any deaths or lifethreatening injuries.

Zaglumyonova told the Guardian that the windows of her balcony were shattered by the explosion, and the clay pots containing plants on her windowsill were broken.

Mobile networks were down for about two hours after the meteorite plunged to Earth as people attempted to call each other and find out what had happened, she added.

The Chelyabinsk authorities said that radiation levels in the region, which has several nuclear power stations, were normal and that evacuations were not underway.

But schools and universities were closed, staff sent home early, and heavy damage reported at one zinc factory that suffered broken windows and collapsed walls.

Rumours swirled in the hours after the incident.

There was no official confirmation of any military action.

The ultranationalist leader of Russias Liberal Democrat party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, said that it was not a meteorite shower, but a test of new American weapons, Interfax reported.

Both the president, Vladimir Putin, and the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, were informed about the incident.

I hope the consequences will not be serious, Medvedev said at an economic forum in Siberia, Interfax reported.

Its proof that not only are economies vulnerable, but the whole planet.

The deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, Russias former ambassador to Nato, called for an international initiative to create a warning system for objects of an alien origin.

Neither the United States nor Russia has the capability to bring down such objects, he added.

Our editors picks for the days top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.

Short link for this page http//gu.com/p/3dzfx.

You can get 2 for 1 tickets to see Collider at the London Science Museum until May.

Whilst in Russia as a Guardian correspondent, Luke Harding found himself in an extraordinary psychological war with the Russian state.

Mafia State is a haunting account of the methods used by the Kremlin against its socalled enemieshuman rights workers, western diplomats, journalists and opposition activists.

More most viewed.


Photograph Niyazz /Alamy.

In February, a meteor exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, causing significant damage.

A recent study in Nature suggests that there are more of these potentially threatening small meteors than we previously thought.

We ask expert Dr Hugh Lewis from the University of Southampton to explain how we can tackle meteors, big and small.

Weve been looking now for a number of years to try to identify all the objects that are larger than 1km in sizeobjects that size are going to cause a lot of damage should they hit the Earth.

When you get down to smaller size, we can only see some of those objects, basically because they are darkerwe rely on them reflecting light from the sun to see them in telescopes and so the smaller they get, the less sunlight they are going to be reflecting.

As you saw with the event over Chelyabinsk, an object that was probably less then 20m in size can have quite a significant impact on the ground.

The meteor itself broke up before it hit the ground but the airburst caused all the damagethe broken windows, throwing people across rooms, and structural damage.

We have the Spaceguard Survey and there are people now who are advocating the use of spacebased missions to look for asteroids.

The B612 Foundation is proposing a mission called Sentinel, where a spacecraft will be launched into a Venuslike orbit to look for objects larger than 140m.

If an asteroid is coming to us from the direction of the Sun, we cant observe it easily with a telescope.

The Sentinel spacecraft will look out from the sun and will see a greater range of objects.

But it will need to have very sensitive detectorsit is planning to use an infrared detector.

We may have decades of warning for objects that we are able to track.

An asteroid threat is a natural hazard that we could probably do something about now with the technology we already have.

All we need to do is make it miss Earth, but in such a way that it doesnt then come back some years later and collide with the Earth.

A big nuclear bomb going off in orbit is probably not the way you want to do it.

Nasa has already demonstrated something that you could use to deflect an asteroid, it was its Deep Impact missionit basically flew a spacecraft into the asteroid and hit it at high speed.

If you nudge it 30 years before it is due to hit the Earth then that little nudge is enough.

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Photograph Youtube.

A space rock, which the Russian Academy of Sciences estimates weighed about 10 tonnes.

Videos show a bright trail streaking through the sky, which is the object burning up as it entered the Earths atmosphere.

The rock hit the atmosphere at a speed of at least 54,000km/h 33,000mph, compressing the air in its path and heating it to thousands of degrees, which gives off light.

The sharp compression of the air creates a shock wave, which is heard as a sonic boom in many of the videos.

Footage clearly shows a single object streaking across the sky, but it is believed the rock shattered some 1832 miles 3050km above ground.

Some videos show a sudden brightening as the body fragmented during its fiery passage through the atmosphere.

Around 40,000 tonnes of space rocks fall to Earth every year, mostly in the form of dust and relatively small meteorites.

The last time something major struck the Earth was in 1908, when an asteroid about 50 metres across exploded in the air above the Tunguska region of Siberia.

It flattened forests over an area of hundreds of square miles.

Friday mornings event was a tiny fraction of this magnitude.

Something like this probably happens every decade but usually takes place over an unpopulated area.

No one is previously recorded to have been killed by a meteorite falling from the sky.

Most of the Earths surface is uninhabited by humans, so meteorites usually fall over desolate areas or the oceans.

Astronomers love their definitions.

A meteoroid is anything in orbit around the sun that is smaller than 10 metres.

It becomes known as an asteroid above this size and up to about 1,000 kilometres.

A meteor is a speck of dust that burns up in the atmosphere creating a shooting star.

A meteorite is a larger fragment, from pebble to bouldersized, that survives to strike the surface of the Earth.

These definitions are blurring, however.

Almost everyone it seems is using the word meteor to describe the object that hit Russia.

Blame Sean Connery.

Back in 1979, he starred in a disaster movie about an asteroid that was to strike Earth.

They called the movie Meteor.

The Russian meteorite hit during the daytime.

The glare of the sun masked its approach, like a fighter pilot using the sun to blind an enemy to the attack.

There could be thousands of asteroids that orbit closer to the sun than the Earth, approaching our planet only occasionally and always from out of the sun.

They are virtually impossible to spot from Earth because they are always masked by daylight.

Only a space telescope could see these effectively.

The European Space Agencys Gaia mission will help discover more of these asteroids.

No, the Royal Astronomical Society in London and the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany, both say that the approach of Friday mornings strike is unrelated to the approach of space rock 2012 DA14, which will draw extremely close to Earth on Friday night.

According to Nasas NearEarth Object Observation Programme, an asteroid like 2012 DA14 flies this close on average only once every 40 yearsalthough it will still be some 17,100 miles above our heads.

Nevertheless, this is closer to the Earth than many artificial satellites.

A recently formed working group of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space would be called into session.

Known as the space mission planning advisory group, it is composed of scientists from Nasa, the European Space Agency and the worlds other space agencies.

The group would immediately meet to advise on the best strategy for dealing with the asteroid.

It would also advise on who has the expertise to build the different parts of the necessary spacecraft, and who should pay for it.

Then it would pass the decision into the hands of politicians.

No.

Incoming asteroids and meteoroids can come from any direction.

Additionally, the Earth rotates once a day, presenting every hemisphere to the different directions of space.

Fridays impact was certainly not enough to knock the Earth off its axis, nor imperil telecommunications networks.

The shockwave was compressed air rather than the electromagnetic pulse EMP created by nuclear weapons and solar flares.

Neither is there a real risk of alien death viruses.

Meteorites fall to Earth all the timenone has brought space bugs yet.

Although there are theories that microbes could hitch rides on space rocks, there is no incontrovertible evidence that this is a widespread phenomenon.

Dr Stuart Clark writes the Across the Universe blog.

Our editors picks for the days top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.

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sciencetheguardian.com o Advertising guide o License/buy our content Article history.

You can get 2 for 1 tickets to see Collider at the London Science Museum until May.

Whilst in Russia as a Guardian correspondent, Luke Harding found himself in an extraordinary psychological war with the Russian state.

Mafia State is a haunting account of the methods used by the Kremlin against its socalled enemieshuman rights workers, western diplomats, journalists and opposition activists.

More most viewed.

All todays stories.

Zaglumyonova told the Guardian that the windows of her balcony were shattered by the explosion, and the clay pots containing plants on her windowsill were broken.

When she jumped out of bed on Friday she could see a huge vapour trail hanging in the morning sky and hear the wail of car alarms from the street below.

Almost 500 people hurt as aftershock damages buildings and jammed mobile networks spread panic Footage of the meteorite was seen streaking across the sky above Russias Chelyabinsk region.

I didnt understand what was going on, said Zaglumyonova.

Additionally, the Earth rotates once a day, presenting every hemisphere to the different directions of space.

Weve been looking now for a number of years to try to identify all the objects that are larger than 1km in sizeobjects that size are going to cause a lot of damage should they hit the Earth.

If you nudge it 30 years before it is due to hit the Earth then that little nudge is enough.

There was a big explosion and then a series of little explosionsour first thought was that it was a plane crash, she said.

My first thought was that it was a plane crash.

What she had actually witnessed were the death throes of a 10tonne meteorite that plunged to Earth in a series of fireballs just after sunrise.

No, the Royal Astronomical Society in London and the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany, both say that the approach of Friday mornings strike is unrelated to the approach of space rock 2012 DA14, which will draw extremely close to Earth on Friday night.

Officials put the number of people injured at almost 1,200, with more than 40 taken to hospitalmost as a result of flying glass shattered by the sonic boom created by the meteorites descent.

Around 40,000 tonnes of space rocks fall to Earth every year, mostly in the form of dust and relatively small meteorites.

Almost 1,100 people have been injured after a huge meteorite flared spectacularly in the skies above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

There were no reported deaths.

We have the Spaceguard Survey and there are people now who are advocating the use of spacebased missions to look for asteroids.

Astronomers love their definitions.

Then it would pass the decision into the hands of politicians.

We may have decades of warning for objects that we are able to track.

The Russian meteorite hit during the daytime.

Nasa has already demonstrated something that you could use to deflect an asteroid, it was its Deep Impact missionit basically flew a spacecraft into the asteroid and hit it at high speed.

The sharp compression of the air creates a shock wave, which is heard as a sonic boom in many of the videos.

An asteroid threat is a natural hazard that we could probably do something about now with the technology we already have.

A recent study in Nature suggests that there are more of these potentially threatening small meteors than we previously thought.

The European Space Agencys Gaia mission will help discover more of these asteroids.

Source YouTube Link to video Meteor explodes in the sky over Russia.

It broke windows, damaged buildings and caused panic as mobile networks overloaded.

The meteor itself broke up before it hit the ground but the airburst caused all the damagethe broken windows, throwing people across rooms, and structural damage.

Mobile networks were down for about two hours after the meteorite plunged to Earth as people attempted to call each other and find out what had happened, she added.

The meteorite entered the atmosphere travelling at a speed of at least 33,000mph and broke up into chunks between 18 and 32 miles above the ground, according to a statement from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The event caused panic in Chelyabinsk, a city of more than 1 million people to the south of Russias Ural mountains, as mobile phone networks swiftly became jammed by the volume of calls.

WARNING these videos contain strong language.

A big nuclear bomb going off in orbit is probably not the way you want to do it.

A recently formed working group of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space would be called into session.

Amateur video footage from the area, often peppered with the obscene language of frightened observers, showed the chunks of meteorite glowing more brightly as they approached the moment of impact.

Videos show a bright trail streaking through the sky, which is the object burning up as it entered the Earths atmosphere.

Some videos show a sudden brightening as the body fragmented during its fiery passage through the atmosphere.

The alarms of all the cars on the street went off after the loud bangs.

A space rock, which the Russian Academy of Sciences estimates weighed about 10 tonnes.

Something like this probably happens every decade but usually takes place over an unpopulated area.

Long vapour trails were seen hundreds of miles away.

Only a space telescope could see these effectively.

A meteoroid is anything in orbit around the sun that is smaller than 10 metres.

The last time something major struck the Earth was in 1908, when an asteroid about 50 metres across exploded in the air above the Tunguska region of Siberia.

It becomes known as an asteroid above this size and up to about 1,000 kilometres.

Footage clearly shows a single object streaking across the sky, but it is believed the rock shattered some 1832 miles 3050km above ground.

At the last count, 474 people had been injured with over 20 hospitalised, according to Russias emergency situations ministry.

Tatyana Bets was at work in the reception area of a hospital clinic in the centre of the city when the meteorite struck.

First we noticed the wind, and then the room was filled with a very bright light and we could see a cloud of some unspecified smoke in the sky, she said.

It would also advise on who has the expertise to build the different parts of the necessary spacecraft, and who should pay for it.

The group would immediately meet to advise on the best strategy for dealing with the asteroid.

All we need to do is make it miss Earth, but in such a way that it doesnt then come back some years later and collide with the Earth.

When you get down to smaller size, we can only see some of those objects, basically because they are darkerwe rely on them reflecting light from the sun to see them in telescopes and so the smaller they get, the less sunlight they are going to be reflecting.

Then, after a few minutes, came the explosions.

At least three craters were subsequently discovered, according to the ministry of the interior, and were being monitored by the military.

Videos from the scene at 923am local time showed objects plunging through the clear morning sky and erupting into enormous fireballs to the sound of multiple explosions.

One crater was more than six metres wide, while another lump of meteorite was reported to have slammed through the thick ice of a nearby lake.

Radiation levels at the impact sites were normal, according to local military officials, Interfax reported.

In Chelyabinsk itself, schools and universities were closed and many other staff told to go home early.

Incoming asteroids and meteoroids can come from any direction.

The figure rose throughout the morning and is expected to continue to rise.

About 200 children were among the injured.

Back in 1979, he starred in a disaster movie about an asteroid that was to strike Earth.

Zinc prices jumped slightly on the London Metals Exchange after it was reported that a local zinc factory had been particularly badly hit and had suffered damage to its walls and roof.

Nevertheless, this is closer to the Earth than many artificial satellites.

A steady stream of lightly injured people, most suffering cuts from flying glass, came into the clinic where Bets works.

She said a nearby dormitory building for college students was particularly badly affected and many of the students were brought in suffering from fright.

There were a lot of girls in shock.

Dr Stuart Clark writes the Across the Universe blog.

Some were very pale and many of them fainted, she said.

Early estimates suggested more than 100,000 square metres of glass had been broken and 3,000 buildings hit.

The rock hit the atmosphere at a speed of at least 54,000km/h 33,000mph, compressing the air in its path and heating it to thousands of degrees, which gives off light.

The total cost of the damage in the city was being valued at in excess of 1 billion roubles 20m.

The meteorite over Chelyabinsk arrived less than a day before asteroid 2012 DA14 was expected to make the closest pass to Earth about 17,510 miles of any recorded cosmic body.

But experts said the two events were linked by nothing more than coincidence.

Rumours and conspiracy theories, however, swirled in the first few hours after the incident.

Reports on Russian state television and in local media suggested that the meteorite was engaged by local air defence units and blown apart at an altitude of more than 15 miles.

As you saw with the event over Chelyabinsk, an object that was probably less then 20m in size can have quite a significant impact on the ground.

The ultranationalist leader of Russias Liberal Democrat party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, said that it was not a meteorite shower, but a test of new American weapons, Interfax reported.

Its not a meteorite fallingits a test of new American weapons, Zhirinovsky said.

WARNING this video contains strong language in Russian.

Some were quick to take advantage of the confusion.

Enterprising people were offering lumps of meteorite for sale through internet sites within a few hours of the impact.

President Vladimir Putin and the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, were informed about the incident, and Putin convened a meeting with the head of the emergency situations ministry.

Its proof that not only are economies vulnerable, but the whole planet.

Medvedev said at an economic forum in Siberia, Interfax reported.

Almost everyone it seems is using the word meteor to describe the object that hit Russia.

Dmitry Rogozin, Russias deputy prime minister and former ambassador to Nato, took to Twitter to call for an international push to create a warning system for all objects of an alien origin.

Neither the United States nor Russia has the capability to bring down such objects, he added.

This has been corrected to 20m.

The B612 Foundation is proposing a mission called Sentinel, where a spacecraft will be launched into a Venuslike orbit to look for objects larger than 140m.

Our editors picks for the days top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.

Short link for this page http//gu.com/p/3dzfx.

sciencetheguardian.com o Advertising guide o License/buy our content Article history.

You can get 2 for 1 tickets to see Collider at the London Science Museum until May.

Whilst in Russia as a Guardian correspondent, Luke Harding found himself in an extraordinary psychological war with the Russian state.

Mafia State is a haunting account of the methods used by the Kremlin against its socalled enemieshuman rights workers, western diplomats, journalists and opposition activists.

Known as the space mission planning advisory group, it is composed of scientists from Nasa, the European Space Agency and the worlds other space agencies.

Most of the Earths surface is uninhabited by humans, so meteorites usually fall over desolate areas or the oceans.

The shockwave was compressed air rather than the electromagnetic pulse EMP created by nuclear weapons and solar flares.

These definitions are blurring, however.

Fridays impact was certainly not enough to knock the Earth off its axis, nor imperil telecommunications networks.

The Chelyabinsk authorities said that radiation levels in the region, which has several nuclear power stations, were normal and that evacuations were not underway.

If an asteroid is coming to us from the direction of the Sun, we cant observe it easily with a telescope.

A meteorite is a larger fragment, from pebble to bouldersized, that survives to strike the surface of the Earth.

A meteor is a speck of dust that burns up in the atmosphere creating a shooting star.

Meteorites fall to Earth all the timenone has brought space bugs yet.

The Sentinel spacecraft will look out from the sun and will see a greater range of objects.

Neither is there a real risk of alien death viruses.

Friday mornings event was a tiny fraction of this magnitude.

The glare of the sun masked its approach, like a fighter pilot using the sun to blind an enemy to the attack.

Photograph Niyazz /Alamy.

Further footage of the meteorite.

Although there are theories that microbes could hitch rides on space rocks, there is no incontrovertible evidence that this is a widespread phenomenon.

No one is previously recorded to have been killed by a meteorite falling from the sky.

In February, a meteor exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, causing significant damage.

More most viewed.

Shockwaves were felt in buildings.

All todays stories.