Chelyabinsk meteor

2013Notable

On February 15, 2013, a 20-meter rock explodes over Chelyabinsk, Russia, with the energy of about 500 kilotons of TNT. Dashcam video spreads worldwide, and about 1,500 people are hurt by broken glass.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First atomic nuclei form → First stars ignite → First galaxies assemble → Milky Way takes shape → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Lobe-finned fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → End-Triassic extinction → Pangaea breaks apart → Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum → Early primates → First anthropoid primates → Apes split from monkeys → Great apes split from gibbons → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → Habitual fire and cooking → Homo sapiens appears → Complex language → Natufian villages → Oldest known bread → Agriculture begins → Irrigation → Uruk and the first cities → Cylinder seals → Writing (cuneiform) → Egyptian hieroglyphs → The alphabet → Phoenician alphabet → Greek alphabet → Solon's reforms → Athenian democracy → Trial and death of Socrates → Plato's Academy → Aristotle's Lyceum → Alexander's conquests → Death of Alexander and the Hellenistic kingdoms → Seleucid Empire founded → Parthian Empire founded → Sasanian Empire → Birth of Muhammad → Muhammad's first revelations → The Hijra → Conquest of Mecca → Death of Muhammad and the Rashidun caliphate → Arab conquests → Abbasid Caliphate → Battle of Talas → Paper reaches the Islamic world → House of Wisdom → Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics → Bacon's Novum Organum → Royal Society → Papin's steam digester → Newcomen steam engine → Watt's steam engine → Thermodynamics → Conservation of energy → Kinetic theory of gases → Boltzmann's statistical entropy → Quantum hypothesis → Bohr model of the atom → Quantum mechanics → Transistor → Integrated circuit → ARPANET → TCP/IP → World Wide Web → YouTube → Chelyabinsk meteor

The story

At about 9:20 a.m. local time on February 15, 2013, a rock about 20 meters wide entered the atmosphere over southern Russia at around 19 kilometers per second. It exploded about 30 kilometers up, releasing roughly 500 kilotons of TNT energy, about 30 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. The flash was brighter than the Sun, and minutes later the shock wave shattered windows across Chelyabinsk and nearby towns, injuring about 1,500 people, mostly with flying glass. No one had seen the rock coming.

Russia's many dashcams recorded the fireball and thousands of videos appeared online within hours, giving scientists the data to reconstruct its path. Fragments fell into the region, and a large piece of about 570 kilograms was pulled from Lake Chebarkul in October 2013. It was the largest known object to hit Earth since Tunguska in 1908. It showed that smaller asteroids can be dangerous and invisible, and it gave new momentum to planetary defense programs.

Why it mattered

Boosted funding and attention for asteroid detection and planetary defense.
Provided the best-documented airburst, with video, seismic and infrasound data, to calibrate impact models.
Showed how ubiquitous cameras can turn a rare natural event into a scientific dataset.

Sources

A 500-kiloton airburst over Chelyabinsk and an enhanced hazard from small impactors Nature
Chelyabinsk meteorite of 2013 Britannica
Huge meteorite pulled from Russian lake Sky & Telescope
Additional Details on the Large Feb. 15 Fireball over Russia NASA JPL

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