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Russian meteor hit atmosphere with force of 30 Hiroshima bombs

The meteor that streaked across the skies over Russia in a blinding fireball on Friday struck Earth's atmosphere with a force about 30 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb, Nasa scientists have said.


A meteorite contrail is seen over Chelyabinsk Photo: Yekaterina Pustynnikova/AP

Telegraph staff and agencies
16 Feb 2013

The 55-foot rock, said by Nasa to have a mass of 10,000 tonnes, plunged to Earth in the Urals region on Friday morning, causing shockwaves that injured 1,200 people and damaged thousands of homes in an event unprecedented in modern times.

Nasa estimate that the energy released by the meteor's impact with the atmosphere was 500 kilotonnes, around 30 times the force of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. It entered the atmosphere and broke up at an altitude of around 32 miles, causing a shockwave that blew out windows and set of car alarms in Chelyabinsk two and a half minutes later.

Divers were this morning searching the Chelyabinsk region's frozen Lake Chebarkul for a fragment of the meteorite. No fragments have been found in the region so far - despite some 20,000 rescuers and recovery workers being dispatched to help the hundreds of people injured.

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The strike brought traffic to a halt in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk as residents poured out on the streets to watch the light show before hovering for safety as a sonic boom shattered glass and set off car alarms. Most of the injuries were caused by glass.

"We have a special team working... that is now assessing the seismic stability of buildings," Vladimir Puchkov, the Emergencies Minister, told residents as he inspected the damage in the city.

"We will be especially careful about switching the gas back on," he said in televised remarks.

The meteor explosion appears to be one of the most stunning cosmic events above Russia since the 1908 Tunguska Event in which a massive blast most scientists blame on an asteroid or a comet ripped through Siberia.

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"Instead of creating a (military) European space defence system, the United States should join us and China in creating the AADS - the Anti-Asteroid Defence System," the close ally of President Vladimir Putin wrote.

The US space agency said the 2012 DA 14 asteroid's passing was "the closest-ever predicted approach to Earth for an object this large."

Nasa estimated that a smallish asteroid such as the 2012 DA 14 flies close to Earth every 40 years on average while only hitting the planet once every 1,200 years.

Astronomers have detected some 9,500 celestial bodies of various sizes that pass near Earth.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

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Rescue personnel work at the site of a collapsed wall and roof of a warehouse at a zinc plant in ChelyabinskPicture: EPA/VYACHESLAV NIKULIN

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