Meteor 'power of 20 atomic bombs'

A plunging meteor which exploded above central Russia has hurt almost 1000 people.

WITH a blinding flash and a booming shock wave, a meteor blazed across the western Siberian sky and exploded with the force of 20 atomic bombs, injuring more than 1000 people as it blasted out windows and spread panic in a city of 1 million.

At least 112 people have been seriously hurt among the 1100 injured, according to the Interior Ministry. About 200 children who had been at schools were among the hurt from flying glass and debris.

While NASA estimated the meteor was only about the size of a bus and weighed an estimated 7000 tons, the fireball it produced was dramatic.

The space agency estimates the blast over Chelyabinsk occurred at about 14-20 kilometers above the Earth's surface, and that the energy released was equivalent to a 300-kiloton explosion,

Video shot by startled residents of the city of Chelyabinsk showed its streaming contrails as it arced toward the horizon just after sunrise, looking like something from a world-ending science-fiction movie.

Screen shot of YouTube footage of the meteor that hit Russia. Picture: Supplied

Some feared a plane was about to fall out of the sky while others thought the world was ending.

The terrifying sight was caught in a series of astonishing pictures by residents of central Russia as they headed to work on Friday.

Footage taken by dashcams – dashboard cameras common in the cars of Russians in case of accidents on winter roads or disputes with corrupt traffic police – mean the supersonic blaze has been captured, and shared with the world, in unprecedented detail.

Some believed the world was ending and video footage posted online showed screaming youngsters at a school where corridors were littered with broken glass.

Gulnara Dudka, a resident of Chelyabinsk, 1500km east of Moscow and the biggest city in the affected region, said: "I really thought it was doomsday."

Screen shot of YouTube footage of the meteor that hit Russia. Picture: Supplied

Teacher Valentina Nikolayeva, who tried to protect her pupils from the force of the blast said: "There was an unreal light that lit up all the classrooms.

"That kind of light doesn't happen in life, only at the end of the world - then a trail appeared like from a plane but only ten times bigger."

The emergencies ministry said that more than 20,000 rescue workers had been dispatched to locate and help those injured in Russia's industrial heartland and an area that houses nuclear and chemical weapons disposal facilities.

Amazingly, there were no fatalities and most of the wounded were hurt by flying glass.

Hours after the panic had subsided, divers began scouring a frozen lake, searching for fragments of the meteor.

This TV grab shows an injured resident after a meteorite fell on the Chelyabinsk region in Russia. Picture: Jiang Kehong/Xinhua/Zuma Press, as shown on Russian TV.

The largest recorded meteor strike in more than a century occurred hours before a 45-metre asteroid passed within about 28,000 kilometres of Earth.

The European Space Agency said its experts had determined there was no connection between the asteroid and the Russian meteor - just cosmic coincidence.

Professor Alan Fitzsimmons, of Queens University Belfast, said there was '"lmost definitely" no connection between the exploding meteor and asteroid 2012 DA14.

"This is literally a cosmic coincidence, although a spectacular one," he said.

Amazing Pictures: Biggest meteor blast in over a century hits Russia

A series of explosions reportedly caused by a meteor shower, has sparked panic in major cities.

The meteor above western Siberia entered the Earth's atmosphere at a hypersonic speed of at least 54,000 kmh and shattered into pieces about 30-50 kilometers high, the Russian Academy of Sciences said. NASA estimated its speed at almost 65,000 kmh, said it exploded about 19 to 24 km high, released 300 to 500 kilotons of energy and left a trail 483 km long.

"There was panic. People had no idea what was happening,'' said Sergey Hametov of Chelyabinsk, about 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow in the Ural Mountains.

"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 shock wave blew in an estimated 100,000 square metres of glass, according to city officials, who said 3,000 buildings in Chelyabinsk were damaged. At a zinc factory, part of the roof collapsed.

Valentina Nikolayeva, a teacher in Chelyabinsk, described it as "an unreal light" that filled all the classrooms on one side of School No. 15.

In this frame grab made from dashboard camera video, a meteor, upper left, streaks through the sky over Chelyabinsk, about 1500km east of Moscow. AP

"It was a light which never happens in life, it happens probably only in the end of the world," she said in a clip posted on a news portal, LifeNews.ru. She said she saw a vapor trail, like one that appears after an airplane, only dozens of times bigger. "The light was coming from there. Then the light went out and the trail began to change. The changes were taking place within it, like in the clouds, because of the wind. It began to shrink and then, a minute later, an explosion."

"A shock wave," she said. "It was not clear what it was but we were deafened at that moment. The window glass flew."

Darya Frenn, a blogger, wrote: "I opened the window from surprise - there was such heat coming in, as if it were summer in the yard, and then I watched as the flash flew by and turned into a dot somewhere over the forest.

"And in several seconds there was an explosion of such force that the window flew in along with its frame, the monitor fell, and everything that was on the desk.

"God forbid you should ever have to experience anything like this," she wrote.

The meteor flash could be seen for miles. AP

Scientists estimated the meteor unleashed a force 20 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, although the space rock exploded at a much higher altitude. Amy Mainzer, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the atmosphere acted as a shield.

The shock wave may have shattered windows, but "the atmosphere absorbed the vast majority of that energy,'' she said.

"I am scratching my head to think of anything in recorded history when that number of people have been indirectly injured by an object like this... it's very, very rare to have human casualties,'' Robert Massey, deputy executive secretary of Britain's Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), told AFP.

Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Vladimir Purgin said many of the injured were cut as they flocked to windows to see what caused the intense flash of light, which momentarily was brighter than the sun.

There was no immediate word on any deaths or anyone struck by space fragments.

In this frame grab made from dashboard camera video, a meteor streaks through the sky over Chelyabinsk, about 1500km east of Moscow. AP

President Vladimir Putin summoned the nation's emergencies minister and ordered immediate repairs. "We need to think how to help the people and do it immediately,'' he said.

"Thank God that nothing fell onto inhabited areas.''

Some meteorite fragments fell in a reservoir outside the town of Chebarkul, the regional Interior Ministry office said. The crash left an eight-metre crater in the ice.

Lessons had just started at Chelyabinsk schools when the meteor exploded, and officials said 258 children were among those injured. Amateur video showed a teacher speaking to her class as a powerful shock wave hit the room.

Yekaterina Melikhova, a high school student whose nose was bloody and whose upper lip was covered with a bandage, said she was in her geography class when a bright light flashed outside.

A circular hole in the ice of Chebarkul Lake where a meteor reportedly struck. (AP Photo)

"After the flash, nothing happened for about three minutes. Then we rushed outdoors. ... The door was made of glass, a shock wave made it hit us,'' she said.

Russian television ran video of athletes at a city sports arena who were showered by shards of glass from huge windows. Some of them were still bleeding. Other videos showed a long shard of glass slamming into the floor close to a factory worker and massive doors blown away by the shock wave.

Meteors typically cause sizeable sonic booms when they enter the atmosphere because they are traveling so much faster than the speed of sound. Injuries on the scale reported, however, are extraordinarily rare.

"I went to see what that flash in the sky was about,'' recalled resident Marat Lobkovsky. "And then the window glass shattered, bouncing back on me. My beard was cut open, but not deep. They patched me up. It's OK now.''

Another resident, Valya Kazakov, said some elderly women in his neighborhood started crying out that the world was ending.

Screen shot of YouTube footage of the meteor that hit Russia. Picture: Supplied

The many broken windows exposed residents to the bitter cold as temperatures in the city were expected to plummet to minus 20 Celsius overnight. The regional governor put out a call for any workers who knew how to repair windows.

Russian-language hashtags for the meteorite quickly shot up into Twitter's top trends.

"Jeez, I just woke up because my bed started shaking! The whole house is moving!'' tweeted Alisa Malkova.

Social media was flooded with video from the many dashboard cameras that Russians mount in their cars, in case of pressure from corrupt traffic police or a dispute after an accident.

The dramatic event prompted an array of reactions from prominent Russians.

Screen shot of YouTube footage of the meteor that hit Russia. Picture: Supplied

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 his vehement statements, blamed the Americans.

"It's not meteors falling. It's the test of a new weapon by the Americans,'' the RIA Novosti news agency quoted him as saying.
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.

Meteroids are small pieces of space debris - usually parts of comets or asteroids - that are on a collision course with the Earth. 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.

A meteorite contrail is seen over a vilage of Bolshoe Sidelnikovo, 50km from Chelyabinsk. (AP Photo/ Nadezhda Luchinina, E1.ru)

NASA said the Russian fireball was the largest reported since 1908, when a meteor hit Tunguska, Siberia, and flattened an estimated 80 million trees. Chelyabinsk is about 5000km west of Tunguska. The Tunguska blast, attributed to a comet or asteroid fragment, is generally estimated to have been about 10 megatons.

Scientists believe that a far larger meteorite strike on what today is Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula may have been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago.

According to that theory, the impact would have thrown up vast amounts of dust that blanketed the sky for decades and altered the climate on Earth.

Paul Chodas, research scientist at the Near Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that ground telescopes would have needed to point in the right direction at the right time to spot Friday's incoming meteor.

"It would be very faint and difficult to detect, not impossible, but difficult,'' Chodas said.

Screen shot of YouTube footage of the meteor that hit Russia. Picture: Supplied

The 45-metre space rock that safely hurtled past Earth today was dubbed Asteroid 2012 DA14 and was discovered a year ago. It came closer than many communication and weather satellites that orbit 36,000 km up.

The asteroid was invisible to astronomers in the United States at the time of its closest approach on the opposite of the world. But in Australia, astronomers used binoculars and telescopes to watch the point of light speed across the clear night sky.

Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science, called the back-to-back celestial events an amazing display.

"This is indeed very rare and it is historic,'' he said on NASA TV.

"These fireballs happen about once a day or so, but we just don't see them because many of them fall over the ocean or in remote areas. ''

A meteorite contrail is seen over a vilage of Bolshoe Sidelnikovo, 50km from Chelyabinsk. (AP Photo/ Nadezhda Luchinina, E1.ru)

Experts said the Russian meteor could have produced much more serious problems in the area hosting nuclear and chemical weapons disposal facilities.

Vladimir Chuprov of Greenpeace Russia noted that the meteor struck only 100 kilometers from the Mayak nuclear storage and disposal facility, which holds dozens of tons of weapons-grade plutonium.

The panic and confusion that followed the meteor quickly gave way to typical Russian black humor and entrepreneurial instincts.

Several people smashed in the windows of their houses in the hopes of receiving compensation, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

Others quickly took to the Internet and put what they said were meteorite fragments up for sale.

A meteor streaked across the sky of Russia's Ural Mountains, causing sharp explosions and injuring over 1000 people, many hurt by broken glass. (AP Photo/Chelyabinsk.ru)

One of the most popular jokes was that the meteorite was supposed to fall on Dec. 21, 2012 - when many believed the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world - but was delivered late by Russia's notoriously inefficient postal service. 

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