Image credit: Google Earth, NASA/JPL-Caltech › Larger view
From the WSJ (NASA JPL Statement follows):
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 the meteor have yet to be found. However, a team from the Urals 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 disintegration of the Russia fireball 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 U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The agency’s new gauge of the meteor’s size was a marked increase from its initial estimate.
==============================================================
Here is the NASA JPL statement:
New information provided by a worldwide network of sensors has allowed scientists to refine their estimates for the size of the object that entered that atmosphere and disintegrated in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia, at 7:20:26 p.m. PST, or 10:20:26 p.m. EST on Feb. 14 (3:20:26 UTC on Feb. 15).
The estimated size of the object, prior to entering Earth’s atmosphere, has been revised upward from 49 feet (15 meters) to 55 feet (17 meters), and its estimated mass has increased from 7,000 to 10,000 tons. Also, the estimate for energy released during the event has increased by 30 kilotons to nearly 500 kilotons of energy released. These new estimates were generated using new data that had been collected by five additional infrasound stations located around the world – the first recording of the event being in Alaska, over 6,500 kilometers away from Chelyabinsk. The infrasound data indicates that the event, from atmospheric entry to the meteor’s airborne disintegration took 32.5 seconds. The calculations using the infrasound data were performed by Peter Brown at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
“We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average,” said Paul Chodas of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “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.”
The trajectory of the Russia meteor was significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, which hours later made its flyby of Earth, making it a completely unrelated object. The Russia meteor is the largest reported since 1908, when a meteor hit Tunguska, Siberia.
Source: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/news/asteroid20130215.html
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.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/asteroidflyby.html
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle@jpl.nasa.gov
Related: A problem that is bigger than global warming
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H.R. (off fishing in Florida) says:
I can’t say that you are wrong, but there are an awful lot of installations scattered around the world by certain missile-paranoid nations looking for large, fast moving objects.
But they are presumably looking for missiles and re-entry vehicles. Meteors may be well outside the parameters of trajectory and radar cross section such systems would be looking for.
Even though an exploding meteor can easily be comparable with that of a nuclear weapon in terms of energy AFAIK it does not have the characteristic “double flash”.
@ur momisugly D. Patterson, Feb 18 @ur momisugly 11.07pm
Take an object with a mass of about 10,000 tons, accelerate it to a high velocity by imparting large amounts of kinetic energy, decelerate the object to less than 10 percent of its high velocity in only a number of seconds in time, watch the forend decelerate faster than the rearend, observie the internal compression disrupt the internal molecular bonds of the object and resultant heating, add the heat from the friction with the atmosphere and vaporization of the foreend material, and you get an object fracturing and vaporizing with a force commensurate with the kinetic energy applied against the resisting forces in the atmosphere and the object.
In other words; what’s the last thing that goes through a bug’s mind as it hits the windshield of your car?
MattN says:
The largest 2 chunks of space debris in the last 100 years hits Russia. What are the chances?
The Russian Federation covers something like 160 degrees of longitude. It’s also the largest country on the planet as measured by land area. The next largest (Canada) is about 60% the area and covers only about 90 degrees of longitude. An alternative second largest would be Antarctica, which is about 80% the area of Russia and covers all 360 degrees of longitude but is mostly located near the pole.
February 18, 2013 at 6:46 pm
The Chelyabinsk event was witnessed over a relatively small area and dozens of similar events could easily have happened over the vast empty reaches of the planet in the last hundred years.
There are plenty of empty places around the planet. If this had happened somewhere other than an urban area what evidence would it have left? (How long would that evidence have remained too…)
Tunguska not meteor but Alignment Mercury-Venus-Earth-Neptune
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/michele-casati-volcanicity-earthquake-geomagnetism-and-the-heliosphere/comment-page-1/#comment-10225
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/michele-casati-volcanicity-earthquake-geomagnetism-and-the-heliosphere/comment-page-1/#comment-10270
meteorite not ….
change atmospheric circulation
generate geomagnetic storm
generate St. Elmo’s fire
is there an estimate of the total mass gained by the earth each year from space dust to meteorites, it must run into kilotons per year, of course we should deduct atmospheric losses to space. Is the mass of planet earth increasing or decreasing over time ??
Charles Gerard Nelson says:
You know I’m always tickled when somebody throws up a graph of ‘Global temperature’ since 1890 or some such. Up at this end of the timescale NASA GISS Hadcrut, Uncle Tom Cobbly and all; equipped with their satellites and calibrated digital thermometers happily deviate from each other by .08 of a degree…but hey in 1890 when there was probably less than a dozen thermometers in the entire Southern Hemisphere and none at the poles…well the ‘scientists’ know for certain sure that the GLOBAL temp was 1.2 degrees cooler than today…
as they say in England ‘do me a favour’!
Even “Pull the other one, its got bells on”. Or a euphemism for “urine extraction”.
Grant in NZ says 4 T/m^3 3 if it was not nickel/iron. Still, a large number
I suspect I am one of the few readers of WUWT who has been to Chelyabinska. I went there just after communism’s collapse, one of the first westerners to ever go to the city where the Soviets manufactured their nukes.
Back then, Chelyabinska was a triumph of socialism – two million people with one official restaurant, a few tiny shops, giant cockroaches in the only hotel and an incredible smell – bad, not good. The dams were full of bright green algae and the airport came with a mud quagmire for a parking lot. But I saw something there, which is impossible in nature: It was a clear day with blue sky if you looked straight up, yellow/orange was the colour from the horizon up about 30 degrees (sulphur from the smelters), but between the two there was a bright green band. Blue and yellow paint makes green, but blue and yellow light does not.
It has probably changed quite a bit since back then, nevertheless if the meteorite had been a bit bigger it might have wiped out this Class 1 polluted city.
In Soviet times, were they capable of telling the difference between incoming meteorites and missiles? If this meteorite had arrived 30 years ago, would we still be here today, or would the Earth be radioactive waste?
Important lesson ; If you are inside a building and you see a big flash outside stay away from the windows until after the pressure wave.
NASA is a big barrel, GISS is the rotten apple.
would we still be here today, or would the Earth be radioactive waste?
Good old atmosphere, what would we do without you? As noted we are in a very sleepy area of our galaxy, one of the only reasons we are here and likely the human race will be long dead and forgotten before we cross paths with anything that could come close the the Late Heavy Bombardment. But it is nice to know we got our 1 in 100 years hit out of the way without much drama.
This Island Earth was in MST3K the Movie. Love those old cornball Sci Fi flicks.
Looks like this one was 1/6 to 1/60th the expolsive power of Tunguska. It’ll be interesting to find out just how high and far away from Chelyabinsk this metor was. A Tunguska size blast over the city likely would have flattened a sizeable portion of it.
I think there’s some exageration going with size and velocity. If a 10 tonne rock did enter the atmosphere going 18,000 km/sec, it would have around 380kilotons of kinetic energy as is being claimed (or more like 500kt). But a rock traveling at that speed would circle the Earth in under 3 seconds. I thought some of the videos showed this thing being visible for 3 seconds or more before the blast.
I’ve no problem with it being the biggest event observed since 1908 or the fact that Russia was host to the last two land impacts – since Russia is a signifcant fraction of Earth’s land surface.
What I do have problems with is comparing a bunch of blown out windows and a 20 ft hole in the ice to something that wiped out almost a 1000 square miles of forest when the 1908 event was supposed to be 20 megatons and this one supposed to be 1/2 megaton equivalents of TNT.
My guess is that both the size and velocity are grossly exagerated. With an inverse square estimate for an energy release 1/40th that of the 1908 event, there should be at least 1/2 square mile of serious tree killing devastation.
If the rock exploded at mach 10 (3450m/s) that would be the equivalent energy of under 15kt, close to Hiroshima size assuming it was 10000 tonnes.
Like most things though. We will have to wait til real evidence is accumulated and honestly analyzed without political agendas being promoted.
Which science fiction movie of the 1950s or late 1940s has a scene early in the film where scientists at a remote astronomical observatory (South Africa perhaps) use a speical instrument to view a planet in a distant solar system, the planet is seen to have prehistoric type dinosaurs, and they come to think they are looking backwardzs in time and actually seeing the Earth as it existed in the Age of the Dinosaurs? The movie was probably a black & white film. Also, this was a movie and it definitely was not the Outer Limits episode where the scientist creates a miniature Earth in the laboratory which goes through a vastly accelerated rate of development with evil consequences.
Werner Brozek says:
The energy in very large explosions such as nuclear explosions is given in tons or kilotons or megatons equivalent explosive, where 1 ton=4.2E9 Joules. This is a common practice, and is even listed in the ISU. I agree most common practices (including using English rather than metric units in America and much of the world) should be replaced by scientific practices, but we are not going to get that soon.
I would note that if the object had impacted nearly vertically, it would still have had the energy of several hundred kilotons, and would have wiped out a very large area totally (about 25 times the energy of Hiroshima bomb). They were very lucky with the grazing angle hit.
Russia Blames Meteor Strike on U.S. Secret Weapon Test .
Rhys Jaggar says:
February 18, 2013 at 11:04 pm
Sooner or later this will get put down to ‘galaxy warming’
lol
Careful…next thing the watermelons and the AGW’ers will be characterizing Hydrogen
as a galactic greenhouse gas and, if it weren’t for H, the universe would be at absolute zero….
then they’ll label all Hydrogen derivatives and molecular structures as pollutants, and ban
them….put a hydrogen tax on everything and try to shut down the sun….always thought
they wanted to move us all back to the dark ages….
WordPress went whacky and posted instead of putting in a carriage return.
A Russian political figure denies the existence of the meteorite which fell on Russia and is claiming it was a U.S. weapons test. Still waiting for the global Warming angel to come up.
A friend was listening to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s “Lucifer’s Hammer” audio book. I was only half listening but it sounded like a pretty good yarn – comet hits earth and messes us up pretty bad. It just got over when I read the first reports. Made me nervous! Like many others, I suspected a “fellow traveller” to 2012DA14 (apparently not) and wondered if there were others (aparently not). No causal link suggested to listening to the book – just another coincidence…
mjk says:
February 18, 2013 at 6:40 pm
So we now accept the analysis of the NASA scientists do we. How ironic.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>..
We accept the analysis of the NASA
scientistsengineers.There fixed it for you.
The NASA engineers have proved they can toss satellites into orbit. NASA scientists have proved they can out bull patty Chilli, a Fresian bull.
EXAMPLE: link
One wire seems to have given the Cuba reports some credence: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/cuba-too-reports-powerful-meteorite-explosion
However, various reports said it had been observed Tu, We, Th, or Friday 15Feb.