VIDEO: Large meteorite caught on dash cameras in Russia
![still-youtube-potapow-614[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/still-youtube-potapow-6141.jpg?quality=83)
Image from RT video, see below.
People are a little jumpy with news of the close flyby of the asteroid 2012 DA14 tomorrow. This meteor actually hit and destroyed a building. make you wonder is this wasn’t a piece of 2012DA14 that was a fragment that got ejected from the main asteroid by some other deep space collision but was in a similar trajectory out ahead. If so, there may be more incidents like this. It may also be simply coincidence. [UPDATE: NASA has issue a statement on this, see below]
Story from the YouTube description, video follows.
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A series of explosions in the skies of Russia’s Urals region, reportedly caused by a meteor shower, has sparked panic in three major cities. Witnesses said that houses shuddered, windows were blown out and cellphones stopped working.
A bright flash was seen in the Chelyabinsk, Tyumen and Sverdlovsk regions, Russia’s Republic of Bashkiria and in northern Kazakhstan.
Lifenews tabloid reported that at least one piece of the fallen object caused damage on the ground in Chelyabinsk. According to preliminary reports, it crashed into a wall near a zinc factory, disrupting the fiber-optic connections of internet providers and mobile operators.
Witnesses said the explosion was so loud that it resembled an earthquake and thunder at the same time, and that there were huge trails of smoke across the sky. Others reported seeing burning objects fall to earth.
Photo from Twitter.com user @TimurKhorev
Police in the Chelyabinsk region are reportedly on high alert, and have enacted the ‘Fortress’ plan in order to protect vital infrastructure.
Office buildings in downtown Chelyabinsk are being evacuated. Injuries were reported at one of the city’s secondary schools, supposedly from smashed windows. No other injuries have been reported so far.
An emergency message published on the website of the Chelyabinsk regional authority urged residents to pick up their children from school and remain at home if possible.
The video suggests it was shot down by the Air Force, that’s now proven false. Word has it that there was an air burst at about 10,000 feet.
Here is another video showing the trail plume, you can hear the sonic boom, car alarms go off, and windows blown out. It is quite something:
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UPDATE: (via NASA’s spaceweather.com)
It is natural to wonder if this event has any connection to today’s record-setting flyby of asteroid 2012 DA14. NASA has issued the following statement:
“The trajectory of the Russian meteorite was significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, making it a completely unrelated object. Information is still being collected about the Russian meteorite and analysis is preliminary at this point. In videos of the meteor, it is seen to pass from left to right in front of the rising sun, which means it was traveling from north to south. Asteroid DA14’s trajectory is in the opposite direction, from south to north.”
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The trail appears to be doubled, but it’s just an elongated vortex from the fireball. Just as a mushroom cloud from a nuke circulates in a torus, the long hot fireball of the meteor rose in the center, causing recirculation. You can see that the two lobes are rotating about the axis of the meteor pass. The dust is the only marker for the fireball, so as clean air is drawn up behind it, the center of the pattern becomes clear.
John Whitman on February 15, 2013 at 6:46 am
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Typo in my last comment.
smalleshsmallishJohn
A number of commenters have referred to astrophysics. This has nothing to do with astrophysics. It’s celestial mechanics or, in this specific case, meteoritics.
Don’t be too surprised if there’s another hit in the next few weeks.
CBS This Morning had segment “Meteor Attack” Attack?… Really?
The Police; these kinds of videos abound nowadays … just a couple years back we (the co I was with for a few years) were the contract manufacturer of units sold by a company in Richardson, Texas: “Watch Guard”; Digital in-car video (and audio of course):
http://www.watchguardvideo.com/
(Did you notice the video taken from the cars that the camera did not ‘wave’ all over the place like your average iPhone-based vid camera does?)
AMAZING video BTW. Quite a sight. Shows the raw power of mother nature and quite literally ‘physics’ where e = 1/2 * (MV^2) …
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“…shot down by the air force…”
Most people really have no conception of how relatively puny and inconsequential Human efforts are compared to the world we live in.
I’m wondering if CNN anchor Deb Feyerick, will ask if this meteor that struck Russia, was caused by Global Warming?
Debris falls in lake.
http://rt.com/files/news/meteorite-crash-urals-chelyabinsk-283/i35fd883df644dcb18fe15ad55a37518b_1.jpg
Couple of corrections.
This isnt a meteor but a meteorite. The former becomes the latter if it hits us.
Also, it wasnt large but on the scale of these thigs a minnow. Maybe an object the size of a bus.
Russian spokes-morons have said it was a first. How do Russians not know about the one in Tunguska that obliterated 20,000Sq KM?
There have been many others inside Human time-scales. Its even been speculated that the fire of Chicago resulted froman air-burst as well as the destruction of one or two other communities. Thats TV level rumination so not necessarily serious.
However, there are in fact some very large craters on the face of the Earth as well as under-sea evidence of large impacts. As for the dinosaurs, the assertion a meteorite did for them is still open to dispute.
But there is absolutely no point worrying about something nobody will ever be able to prevent (outside of the less believeable realms of science fiction). You would need the engineering capability to go far into space and change the trajectories of large objects with immense momentum. as things stand, Its StarTrek territory and in my humble opinion, basedon the feebleness of Human spaceflight efforts so far, it aint ever going to happen.
Whatwe COULD do is apply the same principles (high velocity solid objects) to weapons technology to create some very big non-nuclear bangs.
If states retain their preparedness for large scale nuclear war (which means Russia and China basically) then they are covering the only counter-measures possible, which is provision for what to do if there is ever destruction on such a scale, or up to that scale).
I wonder what the size of the meteorite was… Walnut sized? Softball?
Any astrophysicists want to hazard a guess?
…
How do the media know it was impact from a meteorite and not a smallesh comet? Has someone seen the meteorite material?
Presumably smaller than 50 m, since that’s the size of the one NASA did spot, although we’ll have to await some sort of estimate on its explosive energ in tons of TNT or Joules. Much larger and we would have been pretty likely to spot it. At 50 m it might have snuck in coming from an unusual direction, e.g. perpendicular to the ecliptic plane, as one expects rather less stuff from that direction and I’m guessing it doesn’t get covered as thoroughly either by amateurs looking for asteroids or comets or NASA ditto. Amateurs actually discover a lot of these things, because if you discover a comet you get to name it!
Meteor/asteroid vs comet is not a particularly meaningful distinction. A comet is basically a “dirty snowball” made up of lots of rocky stuff embedded in and glued together by frozen gases. The tail of the comet is gas that vaporizes/sublimates when it gets close enough to the Sun, is ionized by sunlight (so that it glows), and that is driven backwards relative to the motion of the comet much like the solar wind by light pressure. However, a rocky or nickel-iron asteroid/meteor can easily have a covering of various kinds of “ice” (methane, solid CO_2, water ice, frozen O_2 and N_2) or be partially hollow with cavities containing these sorts of ice. It depends on the details of each asteroid’s formation — many of the nickel-iron ones actually were melted, they think by the powerful and rapidly oscillating magnetic field of the young sun, so that they have a fused look and are roughly spherical. Others simply accreted, built out of more normal “rock” with less metal that gradually swept up a lot of stuff as the solar system settled out of the birth of the Sun.
One difference, IIRC, is that a comet would most likely split up into a complete shotgun blast of smaller chunks of stuff as it warms enough for the gases that hold it together melt or vaporize while falling. A rocky asteroid/metor might well also break up, because several distinct parts of it might be glued together weakly by some mix of gravity, some surface adhesion, and frozen stuff, but it wouldn’t break up as finely, as rapidly, as it would have a lot more solid rocky mass and less gas. A nickel-iron meteor would be the most likely to hold together all the way to the ground and actually hit (with devastating consequences where it hit). The only good thing about the air burst is that a lot of the energy of the collision of the object with the Earth went into sound and fury and heat up high, but not so much down low. A metallic meteor that hits the ground moving and 6 to 8 km/sec yields 20 to 30 million joules per kilogram of mass, all released as heat in an instant at the point of impact. This really is the equivalent of a ground burst nuclear warhead (without the fallout).
I’m too lazy to do all the arithmetic (well, actually I have the flu and don’t feel like doing much of anything:-) but if it were (say) 20m is radius and roughly spherical, were rocky and hence had a density of roughly 6000 kg/m^3, the volume is roughly 32,000 cubic meters, call it 200,000,000 kg of total mass. Moving at escape speed (default assumption) of 11.2 km/sec, one gets 64 MJ/kg,
or 12,800,000,000,000,000 (12.8 quadrillion Joules). This works out to be roughly 3 Mt of TNT, the size of “normal” strategic nuclear warhead. This is probably an overestimate, but an energy of ballpark 1 Mt is probably not a bad guess. This is very close to the energy release we would have had from the object that is missing the Earth today, if it had hit, so they aren’t too far from being the same size.
From the look of the trails and the explosion at the end, assuming an airburst at 10000 feet or higher, I think 1 Mt TNT will end up being a good ballpark, but it could have been only 10m in size and 1/8 of this in energy release. We must await measurements or better fermi estimates from physicists on the scene taking into account the actual pattern of damage from the explosion at the end.
Damn lucky it wasn’t nickel-iron and heading straight down into a city, though, regardless of its size. It would have killed a million people in a heartbeat if it hit in the wrong place, just like the one that is missing us today.
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We have an idea of what ‘space junk’ does (and sounds like!) when it comes in over a populated area … the ‘boom’ from the ill-fated Columbia shuttle was NOTHING compared to what was seen/heard in the second video … at the time Columbia burned-up here over Texas, I thought the neighbors next door were out banging around a little … little did I know the catastrophe that had just transpired … some minutes later, after Ed Wallace made the announcement on ‘Wheels’ (570 kHz AM) I went outside and saw the smoke trail …
http://www.columbiassacrifice.com/$B_breakup.htm
Debris imagery was also noticeable on WSR-88D (NEXRAD) weather RADARs from that event too.
Pg 4/306 of this document shows the debris track::
http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/PDFS/VOL2/D10.PDF
RADAR image from Shreveport WSR-88D of the track into Louisiana:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Columbia_debris_detected_by_radar.jpg
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…self correction, after prompting by other comments, surely nowhere near as big as a bus. Maybe the size of a cooker. But it has to be a certain size for there to be anything left after passing through the atmosphere.
I’m deeply concerned that our public officials haven’t the resources to adequately plan and prepare for catastrophic meteor events.
The Russian event demonstrates that much more should be done. Resources must be allocated to better preparedness.
The National Meteor Advisory Council recommends all local governments develop programs to advise their citizenry.
Learn whether Meteors have occurred in your area or could occur in your area by contacting your local emergency management office, state geological survey, National Weather Service (NWS) office, or American Red Cross chapter. Find out your area’s meteor evacuation plan.
If you are in an area at risk from meteors, you should:
Find out if your home, school, workplace, or other frequently visited locations are in meteor hazard areas.
Know the distance of your street from the sky. Evacuation orders may be based on these numbers. Also find out the distance from the sky of outbuildings that house animals, as well as pastures or corrals.
Plan evacuation routes from your home, school, workplace, or any other place you could be where meteors present a risk. Seek any location that is protected from the sky. 300 feet, or more, below ground is recommended.
If your children’s school is under the sky, find out what the school evacuation plan is. Find out if the plan requires you to pick your children up from school or from another location. .
Practice your evacuation routes. Practicing your plan makes the appropriate response more of a reaction, requiring less thinking during an actual emergency situation.
Use a NOAA Weather Radio or stay tuned to a local radio or television station to keep informed of local watches and warnings.
Talk to your insurance agent. Homeowners’ policies do not cover losses from a meteor. Ask about the National Meteor Insurance Program (NMIP). NMIP covers Meteor damage, but your community must participate in the program.
Discuss meteors with your family. Everyone should know what to do in a meteor situation. Discussing meteors ahead of time will help reduce fear and save precious time in an emergency. Review meteor safety and preparedness measures with your family.
If you are visiting an area at risk from meteors, check with the hotel, motel, or campground operators for meteor evacuation information and find out what the warning system is for meteors. It is important to know designated escape routes before a warning is issued.
Always look up wherever you are. Monitor the sky at all times in order to be pro-active.
If you see a ball of fire heading towards you run like the wind, save yourself and record it all on your cell phone.
Some amazing “live” video records of this event. This stuff is fascinating.
Highly skeptical of any claims of anti-aircraft missiles being fired at the bolide. They have contrails of their own. None of the videos of the event I see show any contrail (smoke trail / exhaust plume) at an angle to the flight path of the inbound.
There is also an operational difficulty with their use in this case, as it would require the local military to be on alert, ready to fire on seconds notice. Nothing militarily was going on at or near that part of Russia, so therefore no alert guys with itchy trigger fingers ready to fire in country near instantaneously.
There are some claims of a 10 ton body, which at this point seems to be pure arm waving. Fun stuff though, as they should be able to figure out a parent body based on the inbound trajectory. Will see what the YD guys have to say and will report. Cheers –
There was another inncodent in Russia, there is a place where the radiation level in high and all the trees that were still in some sort of good shape were fallen in the same circular direction. Very interesting. This happened way before man had any sort of bombs, etc. .
It makes one wonder what other threats are out there. Did we know about this one and just were not told. Do you suppose that if we were in threat of this one still making an appearance in about 2 hours, we would be warned if it was truly a threat? You know NASA and governments can put anything they want on here. Could it be possible this was related, and perhaps the danger is not over? How much are we never told so as not to ensue a world out of control and frantic by incoming doom.
Just a thought!
Course I believe in God, but His word does mention inccodents like this, near the and of time.
For all you out there who are making jokes about global warming and the like, I understand that under circumstances such as these things that we have no control over, it is a comfort to make jokes. Yet, truth is last year and the year before we set global weather records, had horrible heat, fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods. Not to mention thousands of birds falling dead out of the sky, sea animals beaching themselves and the list goes on. Even dust storms. Something is changing, are we ready for the change? Can we be ready? Pray and know He will take His people home.
Above the inncodent I was reffering to that is to happen in about 2 hours now is the DA14 meteor.
See further analyses, figures etc at:
Russian Meteor Not Related to Asteroid Flyby, NASA Confirms
Oh… Dashboard cameras.
RE:
Makes sense. Another (handheld) video I just saw, featured at the Washington Post (Second video frame down at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/02/15/stunning-amateur-videos-of-the-russian-meteorite-explosion/ ) captures a single, almost horizontal vapor trail, along with a whole series of explosions – I counted about 20, although some of these may have been echoes – reinforcing the idea that whatever this was broke apart, and its fragments each blew up separately. Something about this suggests a “lump” of something superheating at different rates, bursting open, then each of those core parts heating and bursting in turn. I guess that would be more characteristic of a solid object than a piece of fabricated steel and alloy?
Course I believe in God, but His word does mention inccodents like this, near the and of time.
Urk. Trying — hard — to — resist.
Ah, screw it.
For all you out there who are making jokes about global warming and the like, I understand that under circumstances such as these things that we have no control over, it is a comfort to make jokes. Yet, truth is last year and the year before we set global weather records, had horrible heat, fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods. Not to mention thousands of birds falling dead out of the sky, sea animals beaching themselves and the list goes on. Even dust storms. Something is changing, are we ready for the change? Can we be ready? Pray and know He will take His people home.
All of these things happen all of the time. We did not set global weather records for all time, we set them for the last few hundred years. If you visit here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
you will see that it was literally as warm as it is now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period
Note well “within a degree” of the present, which is the best one can hope to resolve in a world where the climate is always changing up or down, and then there is the weather.
The “horrible heat” of last summer was nowhere near as destructive as the Great Dust Bowl back in the 1930s. That in turn was a cakewalk compared to the drought on the east coast that wiped out the Roanoke colony in the early 1600s — there were basically 7 years without any rain at all. Whole tribes of native americans disappeared (or moved elsewhere to where they could find water) at the same time the colony disappeared, and the Jamestown colony barely survived it a bit further north. None of this even vaguely compares with the disasters associated with the Younger Dryas, which was apparently accompanied by centuries of drought and decades long dustbowls throughout North America from what we can tell from the deposits left in the soil and dated to that time. Tornadoes always happen, and FYI last year was one of the least active years for tornadoes on record. This year continues the longest stretch in the modern record without a major (cateogory 3 or larger) hurricane making landfall in the US.
So nothing is changing. Or rather, sure, it is changing but it is always changing, the Earth is a dynamical system. These natural events are no more a sign of God or the coming of the mythical Apocalypse than any of the other stretches of natural disasters over the past were. When Mount Tambora exploded with the power of 800 megatons of TNT back in 1815, 38 cubic miles of rock were blown to dust. The sound of the explosion was heard 2600 kilometers away (as well as on the opposite side of the Earth where the shockwave reconstructed into a loud sound once again). It affected weather/climate for years to decades. And it didn’t herald the second coming either.
Every generation of Christian since Christianity began has thought that the bad stuff that happened in their time were the signs and portents of return of Jesus and the Apocalypse of St. John from Revelations. Every generation has been mistaken. And if you take the Bible at face value, Jesus stated, quite clearly, that he would return to usher in the kingdom of god during the lifetime of his listeners:
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/says_about/end.html
This did not happen, of course. The Bible was then rewritten to make the time a bit later — during the lifetime of the New Testament authors (who in most cases never met Jesus and were preaching to people that had never met Jesus by telling them that He’d Be Right Back — so be good!) When that didn’t happen, the time was amended again to “soon”. Any minute now. Where it has remained for 2000 years.
I don’t know what kind of evidence it takes to falsify a prophecy, as opposed to a prediction in science. Personally, I would say very little, as prophecy has no sound basis — anybody can prophecy anything they like as long as it is comfortably in the future where they won’t be alive if and when it turns out not to be true. However, it surely is falsified thousands of years later, when none of the prophecies of apocalypse or return have been fulfilled.
rgb
Ice crater edge looks pretty clean, the ice evaporated on the impact
http://content.izvestia.ru/media/3/news/2013/02/545032/DSC00622.JPG
The Mighty Ming is up to his old tricks! Where is Flash Gordon?
Russian meteorite ice crater.
Any expert comments on what is the instrument, protective white suit?
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/RusMet.htm
taken from crater impact image
http://content.izvestia.ru/media/3/news/2013/02/545032/DSC00622.JPG
Vukcevic, It is (with a high level of confidence) a military Geiger counter (I carried one on me when I was among the people manning the checkposts on roads leading to Moscow following the Chernobyl disaster).
The consternated look on the man’s face tells me he is trying to make sense of isolated clicks in his earphones. If there was something to measure, I think he’d be looking at the gauge.
The man in white is probably a random onlooker dressed in something resembling the standard-issue military skiing uniform. Russians are fond of uniforms, and they can be bought cheap at surplus stores.
– – – – – – –
rgbatduke,
With the bait offered up, ‘Resistance Is Futile’ ***.
So don’t resist.
But at the same time I think it is futile using logic and reason and reality to debate with a faith based position. My way is to point out faith’s irrelevance to a topic such as climate science and just move on.
I suggest this quote addresses that somewhat,
*** apologies to Gene Roddenberry
John
Jennifer says:
February 15, 2013 at 9:40 am
“…Not to mention thousands of birds falling dead out of the sky…”
*
Have I missed something? The only birds dropping out of the sky that I know of have been those flying too close to those bird-chopping wind farms.
There have been cases of birds dropping dead because of heat. People, too. Australia 1896, for instance. I don’t know of anything like that happening recently.
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/11/extreme-heat-in-1896-panic-stricken-people-fled-the-outback-on-special-trains-as-hundreds-die/