MOSCOW - A meteor streaked through the sky and exploded Friday
over Russia's Ural Mountains with the power of an atomic bomb, its
sonic blasts shattering countless windows and injuring more than 750
people. The spectacle deeply frightened thousands, with some elderly
women declaring the world was coming to an end.
The meteor — estimated to be about 10 tons — entered the Earth's
atmosphere at a hypersonic speed of at least 54,000 kph (33,000 mph) and
shattered about 30-50 kilometres (18-32 miles) above the ground, the
Russian Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
It released the energy of several kilotons above the Chelyabinsk region, the academy said.
Amateur video broadcast on Russian television showed an object
speeding across the sky about 9:20 a.m. local time, just after sunrise,
leaving a thick white contrail and an intense flash.
"There was panic. People had no idea what was happening. Everyone was
going around to people's houses to check if they were OK," said Sergey
Hametov, a resident of Chelyabinsk, a city of 1 million about 1,500
kilometres (930 miles) east of Moscow.
"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 explosions broke an estimated 100,000 square meters (more than 1 million square feet) of glass, city officials said.
The city administration said 758 people sought medical care after the
explosions and most were injured by shards of glass. Athletes at a city
sports arena were among those cut up by the flying glass.
It was not immediately clear if any people were struck by space fragments.
Another Chelyabinsk resident, Valya Kazakov, said some elderly women
in his neighbourhood started crying out that the world was ending.
City officials said 3,000 buildings in the city were damaged by the
shock wave, including a zinc factory where part of the roof collapsed.
Small pieces of space debris — usually parts of comets or asteroids —
that are on a collision course with the Earth are called meteoroids.
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.
Meteors typically cause sizeable sonic booms when they enter the
atmosphere because they are travelling much faster than the speed of
sound. Injuries on the scale reported Friday, however, are
extraordinarily rare.
The meteor hit less than a day before the asteroid 2012 DA14 is to
make the closest recorded pass of an asteroid to the Earth — about
17,150 miles (28,000 kilometres). But the European Space Agency in a
tweet said its experts had determined there was no connection.
Some fragments fell in a reservoir outside the town of Cherbakul, the
regional governor's office said, according to the ITAR-Tass.
A six-meter-wide (20-foot-wide) crater was found in the same area,
which could come from space fragments striking the ground, the news
agency cited military spokesman Yaroslavl Roshchupkin as saying.
Reports conflicted on what exactly happened in the clear skies. A
spokeswoman for the Emergency Ministry, Irina Rossius, told the AP there
was a meteor shower, but another ministry spokeswoman, Elena Smirnikh,
was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying it was a single meteor.
Donald Yeomans, manager of the U.S. Near Earth Object Program in
California, said he thought it was probably "an exploding fireball
event."
"If the reports of ground damage can be verified, it might suggest an
object whose original size was several meters in extent before entering
the atmosphere, fragmenting and exploding due to the unequal pressure
on the leading side vs. the trailing side (it pancaked and exploded),"
Yeoman said in an email.
"It is far too early to provide estimates of the energy released or
provide a reliable estimate of the original size," Yeomans added.
The site of Friday's spectacular show is about 5,000 kilometres
(3,000 miles) west of Tunguska, which 1908 was the site of the largest
recorded explosion of a space object plunging to Earth. That blast,
attributed to a comet or asteroid fragment, is generally estimated to
have been about 10 megatons; it levelled some 80 million trees.
The dramatic events 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 vehement
statements, said "It's not meteors falling. It's the test of a new
weapon by the Americans," the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
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.
