Explosions in Chelyabinsk; Meteorite Suspected-amazing videos

[The Straight Story]

Explosions in Chelyabinsk; Meteorite Suspected (Russia)

Just WOW:

http://www.russianmachineneverbreaks.com/2013/02/14/what-is-happening-in-chelyabinsk/

Saw something like this in the Tehachapi mountains many years ago at night (was an eerie greenish color at first) but no sounds - one of the videos you can hear it (turn speakers down a tad).

Tip of the hat to someone on reddit for the link.

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. Wow. incoming meteor breaking up - just incredible.

thanks for posting!

[Coyotl]

48. VIDEO: Full News Report

#!

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. Incredible.

[jsr]

3. Wow.

[onehandle]

4. Finally. Our Martian overlords have arrived.

Well, no reason to go to work tomorrow.

[kestrel91316]

5. 25 years ago during the Perseied meteor shower in the summer,

when I was backpacking way up in the Sierras, I saw one of those giant, glowing, green meteors. It seemed to coast lazily across the entire sky and then disappeared. I was amazed at how large and slow it seemed.

[longship]

6. And 2012DA14 zooms by tomorrow!

The kooks are going to be all over this.

Tons of this stuff rains down on Earth every day. During a meteor shower you can often see these bolides zoom through, with their colorful trails which linger long after the body has burned up.

But this seems to be a rather big one.

[elleng]

7. WOW!

We did read that one was expected, right???

edit:

An asteroid a half a football field across traveling at a blistering 4.8 miles per second is expected to pass within just 17,200 miles of Earth on Feb. 15, a record close encounter that will carry it well inside the orbits of communications satellites.

But scientists say a detailed analysis of its trajectory shows there is no chance asteroid 2012 DA14 will hit the Earth and very little chance of a collision with any satellites in geosynchronous orbits 22,300 miles above the equator.

"It's sort of threading the needle," Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told CBS News. "We know the orbit well enough that we can say definitely that it cannot hit the Earth and will not hit the weather or geosynchronous satellites."

Even so, several satellite operators have requested detailed asteroid trajectory data "so they can run them against their satellite ephemeris files to see how close this thing gets," Yeomans said. "There have been no problem (identified) so far."

http://www.kmov.com/video?id=191253161&sec=549507&ref=rcvidmod

[The Straight Story]

9. Not until the 15th (link:)

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/01/31/asteroid-to-buzz-by-earth-closer-than-satellites

On February 15, the asteroid will fly within 17,000 miles of the Earth's surface, closer than some 400 satellites in geosynchronous orbit, which are often used for satellite television, communications, and weather forecasting, and typically orbit about 22,000 miles up. The asteroid will not come as close as low-Earth orbit, where the International Space Station and many Earth-observation satellites orbit.

[elleng]

11. Close enough, imo!

[jannyk]

22. The 15th where? It's been the 15th for hours elsewhere

Are these events connected? Is this a part of it? Or just one we never saw coming?

Questions. Questions. Anyone got any answers?

[LeftInTX]

26. In the early afternoon EST

It is supposed to cross the eastern hemisphere, but not the western. (At least that's what I saw in a diagram)

[RebelOne]

57. It has already come and gone. n/t

[Wounded Bear]

8. That's pretty awesome....nt

[neverforget]

10. That was cool...

I hope no one was hurt though.

[pinboy3niner]

12. My brother spent a lot of time hunting meteorites in the CA desert

He even corresponded with experts in the field at UCLA to better pinpoint likely points of impact, and he used a high quality metal detector in his searches.

It was only after a few years of hunting that he discovered that his equipment's default settings (which he hadn't re-set) were tuned to detect gold. At least all that hiking probably was good for him.

He also discovered that there are some wealthy people involved in meteorite hunting. They have teams of people, helicopters, and advanced equipment. That was his competition.

[Adsos Letter]

13. UN-believable!

That's some amazing footage!

[dixiegrrrrl]

52. found this video just now, shows sky view from start to finish

[rjdem1977_gg]

14. Whoa!

A meteor? That's amazing. Wish I could be there to see it.

[Comrade Grumpy]

15. Wow.

[renegade000]

16. interesting that the sound seems to come minutes after

would make sense though, given the relative slowness of the speed of sound ~350 m/s, and the altitude at which the explosion happened...

wow indeed

[AtheistCrusader]

18. That is bad ass.

I saw one like that over the Cascades in Washington one night, and it was disorienting to see it come down like that. The speed is difficult to grasp, since we usually just see slow shit, like airplanes and stuff, and very rarely anything from outside our atmosphere coming down. Also, the one I saw was much, much smaller.

[OnyxCollie]

19. Holy crap! nt

[burrowowl]

20. Wow!

[ZRT2209]

21. wow

[Demo_Chris]

23. Amazing!

[Rowdyboy]

24. Kick ass videos....Just wow....

[Tree-Hugger]

25. Wow!

That's amazing. Must have been so cool, yet incredibly frightening to view live. And that sound. Wow!

There was one in the USA a few decades ago. Apparently they happen now and then. Someone upthread mentioned they are called bolides.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090302.html

[LeftInTX]

27. Wow, that one entered the atmosphere, then went back into space!

Didn't know they did that.

[Tree-Hugger]

33. They do now and then

I was reading around and I think that has happened a few times. I never realized that happened.

[IDemo]

46. I saw that one from a golf course in Boise

There were fragments coming off, which were later identified by a local woman as aliens bailing out of the UFO.

[Phillip McCleod]

29. chemtrails.

[pinboy3niner]

30. Death Star

[Eleanors38]

38. War Of Da Worlds!

[pinboy3niner]

39. The Blob, pod people...

...or...



btw, Fiend Without a Face was the movie we went to for my 12th birthday party.

[Duer 157099]

31. We should hear within days whether any survived to the ground.

Rest assured, people are already en route to that area to look for the impact site, if there is any. It may have been a comet not a meteor. Last month we had one like that up in the Tahoe area, looked just like that but ended up being a comet.

[Petrushka]

32. (**cough**) "UFO fears" ??? --->

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/15/meteorite-crash-in-russia-ufo-fears_n_2691656.html

[FSogol]

44. Just a weather balloon. Or swamp gas.

[Eleanors38]

58. Man, they must eat a lotta beans in their swamps.

[AsahinaKimi]

34. WOWIE ZOWIE !

[Blue_In_AK]

35. The videos are incredible.

I wonder if this is a fragment off the anticipated asteroid. Those people must have been scared s**tless.

[Tree-Hugger]

36. Here is more information

Here's a little extra info on fireballs. This link explains what they are and you'll see that they explain the smoke trails and the sonic boom that occurs way after the meteorite enters the atmosphere. A good sonic boom can shake buildings and shatter glass.

Apparently these things are pretty common. Bright ones like this with big sound effects are a little more rare, but fireballs themselves are a daily occurrence on this planet.

http://www.amsmeteors.org/fireballs/faqf/

[Warpy]

37. The one with the sound was the best

That incredible explosion followed by the sound of falling glass and all those car alarms! Really impressive!

I wonder how far above the ground that thing was for that first explosion.

[Berlin Expat]

47. It detonated at about 30,000

feet up, and it's a damn good thing it did. The pressure wave from the explosion did a lot of damage, breaking windows, etc.

Imagine if that bad boy had detonated at only 3,000 feet above Chelyabinsk instead. It would've likely produced the effect of a small nuclear blast - say, six to ten kilotons. Who knows? Maybe as high as sixteen kilotons, the same size as the Hiroshima bomb.

The 1908 Tunguska Event produced, it is estimated, a 15 megaton explosion - the same size as the Castle Bravo nuclear test.

[Berlin Expat]

49. Update: The pressure wave

from the explosion has been estimated to be in the kiloton range, anywhere from 1 to 10 kilotons. The shock wave took two minutes to reach Chelyabinsk from the altitude of the explosion.

Good thing it happened as high up as it did. Closer to the ground, and the effects could've been truly devastating.

[Warpy]

56. No kidding. Any guesses yet as to the composition of it?

Thanks for the update. There wasn't a hell of a lot of information out there by the time I went to bed.

[Posteritatis]

59. Most likely nickel and iron, like most of them

They found the spot where the remaining fragments hit the surface, so they probably already have a few of those picked up.

[Warpy]

61. I'd expect a lot of ice, as well

making the whole thing less stable and more likely to go "boom" in the upper atmosphere.

[Posteritatis]

62. Doing 15 kilometers per second through the atmosphere would make anything unstable

It could be a solid hunk of elementally pure iron and, as long as it wasn't a perfect sphere or something, it likely wouldn't come out of that looking pretty. The kind of forces something moving at interplanetary velocities would run into are incredible.

[bananas]

40. Here's the reddit link

"UFO (meteorite, plane or rocket) explodes in the sky above Chelyabinsk, Russia. (youtube.com)"
http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/18kado/ufo_meteorite_plane_or_rocket_explodes_in_the_sky/

[Fire Walk With Me]

41. A zinc factory in Russia is said to have been damaged or destroyed.

Zinc, come back!

[bananas]

42. Looks like this brick building got hit - cloud of smoke and the wall collapsed

http://zyalt.livejournal.com/722930.html?nojs=1

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[dixiegrrrrl]

51. What amazing pics.

I just love what DU folks can find and bring to the discussions.
Still having difficulty wrapping my mind around the idea it was a meteorite...
and of the damage they can do at that altitude.

[distantearlywarning]

43. WOW!

The ones with the sound are amazing! In one of them, the explosion is so fierce that it seems to knock the camera guy down.

[cbdo2007]

45. Wow, that's pretty awesome. That would have scared the

sh*t out of me if I would have seen it in person. I would have surely thought it was the end.

[OldDem2012]

50. Thanks for posting this link...pretty incredible! nt.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

53. "There is no safety in the cosmos." Alan Watts

[Kennah]

54. Damned Bugs of Klendathu. IT'S WAR!!!

[Puzzledtraveller]

55. It was Omega Weapon

[Adsos Letter]

60. Just heard on NPR that the reason so many videos of this event have surfaced

is because corruption is so common in Russia that many drivers have dashboard cams in their cars so that, in the case of an accident, they have video evidence of what actually went down.

Anyone else hear this?