Sure it did. The largest recovered piece was 540 kg, and there were hundreds of others.
Well, I meant “in more or less one piece”, but 640 kg is a larger fragment than I was aware of. Still, it only hit at 225 m/s. Not enough to really cause damage unless it impacts your building directly. I don’t see that any craters were created from the fragments, so almost all of the energy was dissipated in the airburst.
The main mass was originally displayed at the state musem of local history
But is now apparently at the Chelyabinsk Federal Cardiac Center for some reason
I happen to agree with you.
The main mass fell in Lake Chebarkul and was only found because people saw the hole in the ice. It definitely would have dug itself down a bit if it had hit land (though not an explosive crater). The 47 kg main mass from Amo Indiana fall last December was around 7 feet deep.
Great cites both of them. Thank you. But the text there says:
and a large fragment can be viewed on display at the Chelyabinsk Museum of Regional Studies
So it’s not clear why the cardiac center has that meteor stuff on their home page. Unless it’s just the civic pride thing of “Here’s what we’re known for”. And it attracts clicks like ours.
Based on the current thinking that 2024yr4 is ~50-100m in diameter, stony, and not a rubble pile, I’d say that whacking it with a 100 ton penetrator made from / delivered by a Starship with a net delivered energy of 7.5Kt TNT-equivalent would pretty thoroughly shatter / scatter the target.
Using the wiki estimates, Chelyabisk weighed 1E4 tonnes while 2024yr4 is estimated at 2E8 tonnes. Which suggests enough material to make ~2E4 = 20,000 Chelyabinsk-sized fragments if it was divided evenly. Yes, we’re talking stony vs iron, but that’s still a lot of big-enough-to-matter shotgun pellets. And in any collision / fragmentation event the breakup residue is never divided evenly; it’s always some sort of exponential distribution of quantity versus size/mass. i.e. by number it’s lots of dust particles and a handful of really big chunks. Which few big chunks carry WAG^2 ~half the total mass of the original body.
Thereby probably ensuring at least some parts of it do impact the Earth atmosphere even if the object was originally destined to be a clean miss.
Which points out a political issue from any potential diversion of any potential impactor.
Unless the experts are highly, highly certain of creating a clean miss from what would be a sure thing hit, then at least some of the specific resulting damage from any collision is, arguably, caused by the diversion effort. Which risk will IMO be far more paralytic to decision makers than it ought to be.
It’s one thing to say Fate has smitten village A. It’s another to say Fate was going to smite village A, but we diddled with Fate and smote village B instead. Human nature being what it is, the village B folks will be more dead and/or more angry than the village A people are happy to have been spared. All the more so since village B can be conclusively identified after the fact, while village A remains a nebulous speculation from another timeline.
[https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/asteroid-2024-yr4-odds-worsen-for-now/]
Asteroid 2024 YR4: Odds Worsen (for Now))
Up to 2.6% - typically the odds go down though this isn’t strikingly (pun intended) higher and it may drop to a finite number very close to 0 before long.
On the Rumsfeld scale, this is still a known unknown. Like every other asteroid, it’ll become a known known. Yet it’s the unknown unknowns that we need better detection of. Chelyabinsk came out of nowhere as did the Tunguska comet/asteroid (not buying in on natural gas clouds or Aliens yet give them about equal odds).
What’s amazing is, once they fine tune the parameters of the course, they’ll know the time it comes nearest (or nearly misses - in which case they’d know if it was the Kremlin, Pentagon or Springfield).
ETA: And try as they will, Elmo & Trump cannot defUnd theses efforts as it’s the ESA who is doing the hard math. It will be interesting to see if any country “weaponizes” asteroid paths. Nah.
It’s far easier, quicker, and more controllable to deliver manmade WMDs than random rocks from space. The Pentagon term of art is “responsiveness”. ICBMs are highly responsive. Big rocks from space conveniently already aimed by Fate more or less at your enemies are anything but.
But as I almost said in the post above yours, if we can’t be assured of a miss, you can bet there will be fussing about which country(ies) are more or less in the crosshairs.
Yes, weaponizing an asteroid is like attempting to destroy a port by waiting for an aircraft carrier to sail nearby and sending out a bunch of tugboats to try to push it into a collision course.
On reading the wiki, I was reminded that only 16 hours after the Chelyabinsk meteor, a long-tracked asteroid passed within 17,000 miles or about 3 Earth radii and inside the locations of GEO stationary sattelites. It was later determined that orbit-wise, the two asteroids were unrelated.
So there’s a good example of unknown unknowns and known knowns.
I don’t believe NORAD or any of the various Early Warning Systems around the world could have seen an asteroid moving relative to Earth at 19 kilometres per second on approach and if so, they’re not saying. I reckon it was first known from afar as a seismic event as “30 Hiroshimas” would tend to do. Tunguska is estimated at 17 Megatons, or 1/3 of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuke ever exploded. Probably no alert or DefCon changes once it was determined to be non-ballistic.
I was amused at the various dash-cam recordings, ranging from non-chalant, “What’s up with that?” to “wow, check that out!” to “Blyat!” (Shit!) which would have been nearer to my reaction.
There’s an animated GIF on the wiki page: Chelyabinsk meteor - Wikipedia
“Golly. That is a boiide I don’t see every day”
I’d like to give the world enough credit that if it was determined that any “known” asteroid would be a near-miss (i.e. a hit) that it wouldn’t be shrugged off yet, indeed, it would be costly to do DART II paid for by a de-funded NASA. We’ll just repurpose Elon’s Tesla in Space and it will have a soft landing and self-drive the asteroid safely away.
We are up to 11 impacts that were “seen coming”
Great! Can we now assume that Chelyabinsk and similar asteroids will not be a surprise now? (Unless early detection is partly being paid for by the USA).
I was in St. Petersburg when Chelyabinsk hit and it was near an hour before it hit their TV news, and another 10 minutes before CNN picked it up.
The object approached Earth undetected before its atmospheric entry, in part because its radiant (source direction) was close to the Sun. 1,491 people were injured seriously enough to seek medical treatment. All of the injuries were due to indirect effects rather than the meteor itself, mainly from broken glass from windows that were blown in when the shock wave arrived, minutes after the superbolide’s flash.
So early detection would be a good thing, and those who heeded AG Ashcroft to get duct tape and plastic sheeting might be able to avoid serious damage if given enough warning.
Who knows? We haven’t had a Chelyabinsk-scale impact since Chelyabinsk, but there a few Chelyabinsk-size (give or take) near-misses detected every year. The Jerusalem Post reports on lots of them (apparently only so that they can use non-standard units of measurement):
As for the detected ones, 11 since 2008 is a low number, as there are at least dozens of hits that size every year. For instance, there were 12 in 2023 alone that were recovered falls. There would be a multiple of that that fell over inaccessible areas or never reached the ground at all.
BTW, on coincidences, in February 2023 there were unconnected recovered meteorite falls three days in a row:
When footage was broadcasted on the news in the days that followed, I had images of Russian speakers laughing and saying, “The newscasters don’t know what those people actually said!” A few weeks later, when PBS’s “NOVA” did a show about it (which my local station has rerun in the past year) there were lots of bleeps.
Apparently it may hit the moon, sending debris into space…
I hope the Indian space program is on it because looking at the track I doubt that SpaceX/new-NASA will take any interest.
Today’s the anniversary of the Sikhite-Alin fall, which deposited more than 20 tons of iron on the ground, with the largest crater (which was none-explosive) being around 26 meters/85 feet.
I’ve loved those since I found them a year or so ago.
Up to a 3.2% chance.