# Meteorite in Russia, with pics and video **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [February 15, 2013, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374 "2013-02-15T05:37:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/1 "2013-02-15T05:37:45Z")
[Link](http://rt.com/news/meteorite-crash-urals-chelyabinsk-283/). Some pretty impressive imagery in the video clip. > [@](#): > > A series of explosions in the skies of Russia’s Urals region, reportedly caused by a meteor shower, has sparked panic in three major cities. Witnesses said that houses shuddered, windows were blown out and cellphones stopped working. > > Atmospheric phenomena have been registered in the cities of Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg and Tyumen. > > In Chelyabinsk, witnesses said the explosion was so loud that it resembled an earthquake and thunder at the same time, and that there were huge trails of smoke across the sky. Others reported seeing burning objects fall to earth. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 5:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/2 "2013-02-15T05:55:32Z")
HOLY CRAP!!! No one is safe!!! :eek: ---
**Author:** ![the\_diego](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@the\_diego](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/the_diego)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 6:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/3 "2013-02-15T06:01:36Z")
Slightly more than 100 years years after the Tunguska event. Did those things crater? The first footage looks like a ground impact. It must have scared the hell out of those inside the car (Thinking of the scene from "Monsters vs. Aliens.) ---
**Author:** ![Duckster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/duckster/32/1244_2.png) [@Duckster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duckster)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 6:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/4 "2013-02-15T06:17:09Z")
So the North Korean missile test finally ended, eh? ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/5 "2013-02-15T06:23:36Z")
Or maybe the Russians should check for large cylinders where the meteorites landed. ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 6:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/6 "2013-02-15T06:26:47Z")
News item [meteor shower came hours before the close encounter with 50m-wide asteroid 2012 DA14,](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/meteorite-strike-blast-injures-russians/story-e6frg6so-1226578992644) > [@](#): > > A METEOR shower caused explosions in the lower atmosphere above Russia’s Urals region, blowing out windows in some areas and leaving several people injured. > > “A meteorite exploded above the Chelyabinsk region (of the Urals). The shock wave blew out windows in several places,” but no meteor fragments hit the ground, an emergencies ministry spokesman told the Interfax news agency. > > “According to the preliminary information, four people were injured by flying glass,” the ministry added. > > An agency report spoke of several injuries. > > Witnesses cited by news agencies spoke of hearing loud explosions which led to panic among residents in the thinly-populated region ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 6:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/7 "2013-02-15T06:31:26Z")
[My thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=682414). And yes, it’s possible they are related; the meteors could be fragments of the asteroid still loosely associated with it. ---
**Author:** ![Lord\_Feldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lord_feldon/32/341_2.png) [@Lord\_Feldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lord_Feldon)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/8 "2013-02-15T06:53:03Z")
Russia Today is claiming that it was “shot down by Russian air defense.” :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 6:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/9 "2013-02-15T06:56:55Z")
> [@Lord\_Feldon](#): > > Russia Today is claiming that it was “shot down by Russian air defense.” :rolleyes: Yeah, I was just looking at [this YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TtOL5OiWTNI) of the event, and it has that claim as the top caption. ---
**Author:** ![Foggy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foggy/32/1082_2.png) [@Foggy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Foggy)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 8:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/10 "2013-02-15T08:31:42Z")
[Phil Plait](http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy.html) has posted about this over at Slate. ---
**Author:** ![Crime\_Scene](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e495f1/32.png) [@Crime\_Scene](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crime_Scene)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 9:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/11 "2013-02-15T09:52:01Z")
Maybe I want there to be more so that is skewing my view of this, but I feel like there _is_ more to this than we know or perhaps will ever know. Anything that happens in Russia, rather it be a video of a cat sleeping or the enrichment of uranium, piques my interest. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 10:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/12 "2013-02-15T10:31:36Z")
Damn, the Slate post has several videos. Damn, I don’t speak Russian but I can imagine that some of the commentary is pretty invective filled! ---
**Author:** ![Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiendish_astronaut/32/3295_2.png) [@Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fiendish_Astronaut)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 10:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/13 "2013-02-15T10:31:53Z")
Here’s another video from a car which is good quality: [- YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7c-0iwBEswE) I love the way the Meteorite appears out of the sky. I think I would’ve been scared for a few seconds when I first saw that - especially with news in the back of my mind about the near miss-astroid. Is there any chance that this could be a broken off piece of that astroid or that this meteorite and the astroid are part of a collection of debris from a common object? ---
**Author:** ![Mogle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mogle/32/12021_2.png) [@Mogle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mogle)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 10:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/14 "2013-02-15T10:42:00Z")
> [@Fiendish\_Astronaut](#): > > Is there any chance that this could be a broken off piece of that astroid or that this meteorite and the astroid are part of a collection of debris from a common object? An astronomer on the radio this morning said that he thought it was unlikely for this impact to be related to DA14, the timing is just a coincidence. We’ll know more once they’ve managed to determine the meteor’s trajectory. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 10:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/15 "2013-02-15T10:51:16Z")
> [@Fiendish\_Astronaut](#): > > Is there any chance that this could be a broken off piece of that astroid or that this meteorite and the astroid are part of a collection of debris from a common object? The Phil Plait/Bad Astronomy article talks about that. > [@](#): > > I’m trying to piece together what happened from the videos. First of all, I do not think this is related in any way to the asteroid 2102 DA14! For one thing, this occurred about 16 hours before DA14 passes. At 8 kilometers per second that’s nearly half a million kilometers away from DA14. That puts it on a totally different orbit. > > For another, from the lighting, time of day, and videos showing the rising Sun, it looks like this was moving mostly east-to-west. I may be off, but that’s how it looks. DA14 is approaching Earth from the south, so any fragment of that rock would also appear to move south-to-north. > > So again, I think this is unrelated to 2012 DA14. But wow, what a huge coincidence! ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 11:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/16 "2013-02-15T11:05:08Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > Damn, the Slate post has several videos. Damn, I don’t speak Russian but I can imagine that some of the commentary is pretty invective filled! The _“Yobat’!”_ heard several times is the so-called “F-word.” 🆒 ---
**Author:** ![Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiendish_astronaut/32/3295_2.png) [@Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fiendish_Astronaut)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 11:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/17 "2013-02-15T11:39:42Z")
Here’s a other video from interior video cameras of windows and doors being blown off. Pretty incredible actually: [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/1kvHl5Qcnzc/maxresdefault.jpg " - YouTube") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kvHl5Qcnzc) ---
**Author:** ![AaronX](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/7bcc69/32.png) [@AaronX](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AaronX)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 12:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/18 "2013-02-15T12:32:06Z")
We’re really just hanging on to this precarious rock hurtling through (not so empty) space. Why does Russia seem to get so many meteors? First Tunguska, now this? Is the Northern Hemisphere more likely to get hit? ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/19 "2013-02-15T12:54:06Z")
i’m a bit surprised that everyone says this is unrelated to the pass-by of 2012 DA14. Within 24 hours of an extremely close pass of a meteoroid another enters the atmosphere, and it’s not likely to be related? Certainly asteroids travel in “packs”, the detritus associated with a comet, and retrurn every year appearing to originate from the same region of the sky ("Hence, for instance “Perseids”, which appear to radiate fromk the constellation Perseus). It’s not inconceivable that, even if 2012 DA14 is not associated with a known comet, it’s still a remnant from some long-gone comet, and has nearby buddies sharing an elliptical path. Even if not associated with a comet, if a slightly larger asteroid fractured because of impacts, or unequal heating, or whatever, you’d expect the pieces to remain relatively close together in similar orbits, pulled apart only slightly by differential gravitational effects and the like. It seems to me much more likely that these two asteroid/meteoroids _are_ associated in some way. I point out that the Tunguska meteorite, to which this is inevitably compared, was followed five hours later by the fall of another, much smaller meteor in Russia. Most accounts of the Tunguska don’t mention this. The Tunguska, by the way, was associated with the Pons-Winnecke comet. Lastly, just an odd note, which can definitely have no connection, save in the minds of those who see woo-woo synchronicities, but Chelyabinsk, near where this fell, was the site of a large nuclear waste dump in Russia,which had a major release of radioactivity due to a small-scale explosion in 1957, and two subsequent events. It’s been called “the most polluted place on earth” (arguably hyperbole, but I belie ve it released miore radioactrivity than the nuclear plant accident at Chernobyl). > **[Kyshtym disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_Disaster)** > > The Kyshtym disaster, sometimes referred to as the Mayak disaster or Ozyorsk disaster in newer sources, was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on 29 September 1957 at Mayak, a plutonium production site for nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant located in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40 (now Ozyorsk) in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. > The disaster is the worst nuclear incident by radioactivity released, after the Chernobyl disaster. It is the only... > **[Chelyabinsk | LOGTV | Slawomir Grünberg](https://logtv.com/chelyabinsk/)** > > For forty-five years, Chelyabinsk province of Russia was closed to all foreigners.Only in January of 1992 did President Boris Yeltsin sign a decree changing that. Shortly afterwards, I made my first trip to this region, which later Western scientists... ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2013, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374/20 "2013-02-15T12:59:29Z")
My reply in tyhis thread – they certainly can be-- [Meteorite in Russia, with pics and video - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=682414) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/meteorite-in-russia-with-pics-and-video/650374.md?page=2)