Updated 11:45 am: While the world waits for an asteroid large enough to destroy a city to graze the orbits of our television satellites, citizens of Central Russia were greeted early Friday morning by a more mortality-shaking kind of astronomical event: a giant meteorite exploding across the atmosphere in a spectacular fireball, brighter than the still-rising sun, blowing out windows and injuring as many as a thousand people.
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A classroom in the city of Chelyabinsk, after the shockwave (via chelyabinsk.ru)
The meteor disintegrated over the Ural mountains. (Map via Sydney Morning Herald)
While Earth is currently thought to be safe from Earth-ending asteroids, NASA and others struggle to keep track of large Near Earth Objects (and the US space agency is even training to land on one). A dangerous NEO doesn't need to reach the surface to make an impact. In 1908 a meteor estimated to be around 50 meters across exploded above Tunguska, Siberia in remote Russia. The blast, known as the Tunguska Event, had the strength of a 15 megaton nuclear bomb (the light from the explosion was seen in London) and flattened trees for over 830 square miles.Russian officials have said that meteorite pieces from this event were not expected to land on Earth. But that isn't likely to stop the meteorite hunters from looking: the space-rock industry is already booming in Central Russia, where, 10,000 years ago a shower of iron is said to have spread minerals--some of the most primitive materials in the solar system--across the region. The government doesn't mind the business, reported Russia Today in 2011: it levies a meteorite tax on sales of these rocks, which are thought to be part of the building blocks of planets.Connections