Exactly five years ago, on February 15, 2013, residents of the Chelyabinsk region saw a bright flash in the sky. Many mistook it for a fallen plane or satellite and did not immediately recognize that a meteorite had exploded over the region. It split into dozens of fragments, the search for which is still ongoing. Leading researcher at the Department of Lunar and Planetary Research at the Sternberg State Astronomical Institute, Vladimir Busarev, told MIR 24 about why Chelyabinsk meteorite miraculously survived and how to behave if you suddenly find a fragment of a cosmic body.

- Every year thousands of meteorites fall to Earth. Why did Chelyabinsk turn out to be so popular?

This is the first time we have observed a case where an ordinary chondrite fell to Earth, and in such a large volume. The weight of the fragments that reached the Earth exceeded 650 kilograms. This is a fairly rare type of meteorite, which is why it is considered a find. It is also important that the Chelyabinsk meteorite was found relatively quickly - six months after the fall, and began to be studied immediately. Stones that have lain for some time on the surface of the Earth have less value. They have definitely undergone changes that are characteristic only of terrestrial conditions, but not of cosmic matter. Thus, on the largest fragment of a meteorite that fell into Lake Chebarkul, living microorganisms of terrestrial origin were discovered. But it cannot be said that this prevented research.

- How did these bacteria get there?

The largest fragment of the meteorite lay at the bottom of the lake for six months. It turned out that it had pores through which it was saturated with earthly water, and along with it bacteria penetrated the surface of the fragment. However, we cannot say that the origin of microorganisms is extraterrestrial, because we are dealing with a substance that was contaminated under terrestrial conditions. The Chelyabinsk meteorite has no signs of extraterrestrial life. This can be said with complete certainty, even though not all the fragments have yet been recovered from the bottom of the lake.

- Colleagues from the Ural University presented you with a sample of the Chelyabinsk meteorite. Tell us about it.

It is small, weighing several tens of grams. We studied it in laboratory conditions. We looked at its reflective characteristics and composition of the substance. We were convinced that it was a stone meteorite, it consists of the so-called ordinary chondrite. The iron content in it is small, no more than 20 percent. These types of stony meteorites are quite rare. They have poor "survival" because they are less able to survive passage through earth's atmosphere. That is, they are very fragile. In general, all known meteorites have been studied by us only a quarter. Therefore, there is great interest space projects for the delivery of samples from the Moon or Mars. Only original cosmic matter can provide complete information about the origin of a particular planet solar system or an asteroid.

- Was it because of this fragility that the explosion occurred?

Yes, from the fragments of the Chelyabinsk meteorite it is clear that its body is not monolithic, it cracked while flying towards the Earth. If the body had been monolithic, perhaps the explosion would not have occurred, and a fragment of a larger mass would have fallen onto the earth's surface. Eyewitnesses said they heard a series of explosions, but in fact there was only one explosion. The sound simply had a whole spectrum of waves. The acoustic effect was like thunder: at first the sound was weak, then it intensified. People thought there were several explosions. The fact is that meteorite fragments entered the atmosphere at supersonic speed, and there were many of these fragments. This explains the unusual sound effects.

- Why was the meteorite called Chelyabinsk and not Chebarkul?

Initially they wanted to call it Chebarkul. But the fact is that only the largest fragment of a meteorite fell in Chebarkul. The substance, a fragment of which is the Chelyabinsk meteorite, scattered beyond the boundaries of this populated area for quite some time. large area. Therefore, the scientific community decided to emphasize in the title that the fall of the cosmic body occurred in the Chelyabinsk region and did not concern only Chebarkul.

- What is known about the cosmic body from which the Chelyabinsk meteorite broke off?

It is approximately 4.5 billion years old. About 300 million years ago it collided with other cosmic bodies. The strong collision led to fragmentation and the formation of a secondary body, which, in turn, was also fragmented. The fact of the collision is confirmed by jadeite, a greenish mineral that is part of the Chelyabinsk meteorite. It is formed only when high temperatures and pressure, is a bit like jade, a mineral used to make jewelry.

Particularly enterprising residents of Chelyabinsk have repeatedly tried to sell fragments of the famous meteorite. How do you feel about this behavior?

Scientists, in principle, have a negative attitude towards this type of fraud and urge all people who find meteorites to donate them for research. Thus, fragments of the Chelyabinsk meteorite must first be given to the Chelyabinsk State University. Also in Moscow, at the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, there is a committee on meteorites. We must understand that scientists always have the opportunity to obtain some valuable information about meteorites. Any such finds are of scientific interest to us, and the state is ready to pay for them.

- Which of the meteorites that fell in Russia is considered the most mysterious?

Perhaps Tunguska. There was no debris left from it, so no one knows exactly what this meteorite was. I can assume that it was a meteorite of a primitive icy composition. The sudden heating in the Earth's atmosphere led to a thermal explosion. If you remember, this explosion was accompanied by a powerful glow. It was as strong as a nuclear explosion. There is still an assumption that it was not a meteorite, but a nuclear explosion. But this is not so, because no products of thermonuclear reactions were found at the site. You can learn more about the Tunguska meteorite, but to do this you need to study a large area in the permafrost of the impenetrable taiga using highly sensitive equipment. This is quite difficult to organize. In addition, if any isotopes are discovered there, they need to be studied immediately on the spot. Transporting them is very difficult. If we could conduct a long-term expedition, we would learn something new about the Tunguska meteorite.

At the time of entry into the Earth's atmosphere, the Chelyabinsk meteorite weighed 13 thousand tons and was the size of a seven-story building. Among the meteorites that fell in Russia, it became the largest after Tunguska. Scientists have determined that the meteorite entered the atmosphere at a speed of 19 kilometers per second. Some of the fragments, approaching the Earth, collapsed and burned in the atmosphere. The shock wave knocked out glass in many buildings and destroyed the cladding. About a thousand people received injuries of varying severity. The material damage to the region from the meteorite fall exceeded a billion rubles. The largest fragment of the meteorite became an exhibit at the State Historical Museum of the Southern Urals. Everyone can touch it.

Most often, meteorites fall in Antarctica. According to experts, there are about 700 thousand of them scattered on the mainland. The largest meteorite is called Goba, it was discovered in Namibia in 1920. Its weight exceeds 60 tons.

Chelyabinsk meteorite- a stone meteoroid that fell on February 15, 2013 in the area of ​​Lake Chebarkul in the Chelyabinsk region. The meteorite fell at 9:20 local time 80 km west of Chelyabinsk. As a result of the meteorite fall, 1,491 people were injured.

According to experts, the mass of the meteorite was up to 10,000 tons, and its diameter was about 15-17 m. The flight of the meteorite body from the moment it entered the atmosphere lasted 32.5 seconds. During its flight in the atmosphere, the meteorite broke into many parts, and therefore fell to the ground in the form of a meteor shower. At an altitude of 15-25 meters, the meteorite broke up into several parts as a result of a series of explosions. The speed of the fireball's fall ranged from 20 to 70 km/s. When falling, the space object left a bright trail that was visible even in Kazakhstan and the Samara region.

When the meteorite broke into several parts, shock waves were formed. According to experts, total quantity The energy released during the destruction of the cosmic body amounted to up to 500 kilotons of TNT equivalent.

Chronicle of the fall of the Chelyabinsk meteorite

At 9:15 local time, the movement of the cosmic body was seen by residents of the Kostanay and Aktobe regions of Kazakhstan. At 9:21 a.m. a meteorite trail was spotted in Orenburg region. The meteorite's fall was witnessed by residents of the Sverdlovsk, Tyumen, Kurgan, Samara and Chelyabinsk regions, as well as the Republic of Bashkortostan.

At 9:20 local time, a meteorite fell into Lake Chebarkul, located 1 km from the city of Chebarkul. The fall of parts of the meteorite was observed by fishermen who were fishing near the lake. According to eyewitnesses, about 7 fragments of a cosmic body flew over the lake, one of which fell into the lake, raising a column of water 3-4 meters high. On satellite map you can see Lake Chebarkul, where the meteorite fell.

As a result of the fall of the meteorite, a blast wave was formed, which in terms of energy released exceeded the energy of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Due to the gentle trajectory of the body’s entry into the atmosphere, only part of the released energy reached settlements.

Consequences of the fall of the Chelyabinsk meteorite

Since most of the energy had dissipated, the blast wave mainly shattered glass in buildings in nearby communities. The meteorite injured 1,491 people, but most injuries were due to cuts and bruises from broken glass. However, the Chelyabinsk meteorite has no equal in the world in terms of the number of victims.

The greatest damage from the disaster was suffered by 6 settlements in the Chelyabinsk region: the cities of Yemanzhelinsk, Chelyabinsk, Korkino, Kopeisk, Yuzhnouralsk and the village of Etkul. The shock wave damaged many buildings: the damage from it is estimated from 400 million to 1 billion rubles.

Chelyabinsk zinc plant, the roof of which collapsed from the blast wave of a meteorite

Research and study of the Chelyabinsk meteorite

On February 15, 2013, it was established that fragments of a meteorite fell in the Chebarkul and Zlatoust districts of the Chelyabinsk region. Scientists from UrFU collected fragments of the meteorite for further study.

Researchers later told the press that the meteorite was an ordinary chondrite, which consists of sulfites, iron, olivine and fusion crust.

On February 15, 2013, a meteor shower hit the Chelyabinsk region. At 9:20 local time, a meteorite exploded in the sky, 30-50 km from Earth. The shock wave broke windows in houses, hospitals, kindergartens, and schools. Shop windows burst. Meteorite fragments damaged buildings.

More than 1,000 people went to hospitals with cuts and bruises, some of them were hospitalized in in serious condition. According to residents, a trail first appeared in the sky, as if from a jet plane, and then “the sun began to shine.”

“I taught a physical education class in kindergarten and saw in the window in the sky white stripe, and then there was a bright flash,” Chelyabinsk resident Lyudmila Belkova told Gazeta.Ru. —

I shouted to the children: get down on the floor! Close your eyes! And then there were about five or six more explosions. One of the kids raised their head, but I shouted at them to close their eyes.”

The shock wave was very hot, residents said. And a metallic taste remained in the mouth even several hours after the explosion. Although the explosion occurred over the Chelyabinsk region, it was so bright that it was visible from the Sverdlovsk region and even from the Tyumen region. Some of the meteorite debris fell on Chelyabinsk. The zinc plant was damaged - a fragment fell on its roof and broke it. Pieces of bricks littered the roadway.

Photo report: 5 years of the Chelyabinsk meteorite

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In total, almost 7 thousand apartment buildings, 740 schools, 290 hospitals and clinics, 69 cultural and sports buildings were damaged in the Chelyabinsk region. The head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Vladimir Puchkov, estimated the damage from the meteorite fall at almost half a billion rubles.

There were about 20 thousand rescuers to search for meteorite fragments. Soon fragments of the meteorite were found, two in the Chebarkul district of the Chelyabinsk region, another in the Zlatoust region. At the site of the supposed fall of a meteorite fragment near Lake Chebarkul, in the vicinity of the city of the same name, about 80 km from Chelyabinsk, the military discovered a crater with a diameter of about six meters. The radiation background at the funnel was normal.

When it became known that the crater was not dangerous, local residents moved towards it en masse.

Many of them went for fragments as souvenirs; meteorite fragments were put up for sale at online auctions at prices up to 100 thousand rubles per fragment. To avoid the removal of fragments from the country, we even had to connect.

Even Chelyabinsk Patent Group CJSC tried to make money on meterite by submitting applications to Rospatent to register the trademarks “Mysterious meteorite”, “Ural meteorite” and “Chebarkul meteorite”.

An online survey of the population was conducted. Thousands of people have described what they saw and heard when the meteorite appeared.

“Already the intermediate processing yielded new facts that had eluded numerous photo and video cameras: several dozen independent witnesses indicated that during the flight of the car they heard a hissing sound, often comparing it with sparklers, and more than fifty people simply reported sounds without detailed description. This was a few minutes before the arrival of the shock wave,” one of the organizers of the survey, astronomer Stanislav Korotky, told Gazeta.Ru. “Since sound waves cannot travel distances of tens of kilometers in a fraction of a second, this phenomenon must have a different nature.”

A little more than a week later, 2/3 of the damaged buildings were restored - glass was installed, walls were restored. And new fragments of the meteorite continued to be found. There were also large pieces, the size of a fist, but mostly small ones. In the first month, we managed to collect about 3.5 kg of fragments. But the biggest find lay ahead.

In the fall of 2013, a mass of 654 kg was lifted from Lake Chebarkul.

When lifted from the lake and weighed, it split into several parts; as a result, it was decided to consider the largest surviving fragment weighing 540 kg to be the main fragment. Subsequently, scientists clarified that it is actually 473 kg.

Analysis of the fragments showed: the meteorite belongs to the class of ordinary chondrites LL5 (the least common group of ordinary chondrites, with a total iron content of 19-22% and only 0.3-3% metallic iron), characterized by shock fraction S4 (traces of moderate impact of shock waves) and degree of weathering W0 (without visible traces of oxidation). Using isotope analysis, it was possible to find out that it is almost the same age as the Universe, its age was 4.56 billion years.

Czech scientists calculated that it amounted to 500 kilotons of TNT, which is 12 times more powerful than the explosion atomic bomb over Hiroshima. They also believe that it was once integral with the near-Earth 2.2-kilometer asteroid 999NC43, and then broke away from it.

British researchers determined that at the moment of passage the meteorite reached a peak brightness, 30 times higher than the brightness of the Sun. Moreover, in their opinion, the number of potentially dangerous meteorites like the one in Chelyabinsk is actually 10 times higher than previously thought.

And Olga Popova, a senior researcher at the Institute of Geosphere Dynamics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and her colleagues found that the speed of the meteorite was 19 kilometers per second, its size was 18-20 meters, and its mass was 1.3 * 10 7 kilograms.

In the scientific community, interest in the event was enormous: the conference hall of the Sternberg State Astronomical Institute, where the first scientific reports on the meteorite were heard, experienced such excitement for recent years perhaps only in the summer of 2012 at a report dedicated to the discovery of the Higgs boson.

In Russia, the Chelyabinsk meteorite has become a household name - many celestial bodies approaching the Earth are compared with it. In 2014, “A Light Touch of the Universe...”, released by the Chelyabinsk Museum of Local Lore, and a triptych by a Ural painter were dedicated to him. Numerous recordings of the meteorite fall, made by video recorders, went viral on the Internet and gave rise to many jokes and questions abroad about why so many Russians have cameras in their cars.

The meteorite fragments are kept in the Chelyabinsk Museum of Local Lore. According to the head of the department theoretical physics Chelyabinsk State University (CSU) Alexander Dudorov, today it is known that up to 95% of meteorite fragments found on earth “went to different hands,” including to foreigners, which complicates their study.

5 years ago, on February 15, 2013 at 9:20 (7:20 Moscow time), residents of Chelyabinsk, as well as the Sverdlovsk, Kurgan, Tyumen regions, part of northern Kazakhstan, witnessed a rare astronomical phenomenon - the appearance of a bright superbolide (a very bright large meteor - fragment space object) moving in a westerly direction. The movement of the fireball was accompanied by several flashes (perceived by eyewitnesses as explosions due to strong pops heard after some time), the brightest of which lasted, according to various sources, from one to five seconds, while the heat from it was felt, stronger than from the Sun during the day.

Later, witnesses to the event said that it was painful for them to look at the car. About 25 people out of 1.1 thousand respondents reported that they received burns, 315 felt heat, and 415 felt heat from the fireball’s radiation. One of local residents received such severe burns to his face that his skin began to peel off, as if from an extremely strong tan.

The meteorite (a space object that flew through the atmosphere and fell to the ground), later named "Chelyabinsk", turned out to be "sounding": witnesses heard electrophone sounds - the so-called strange crackling sounds that are sometimes heard during the flight of a fireball. Such sounds cannot come from the cosmic body itself; scientists believe that they are provoked by electromagnetic fields arising during its flight.

Numerous meteorite fragments fell over a large area - almost the entire Chelyabinsk, along with its suburbs, fell into the zone of their fall.

The shock wave in Chelyabinsk knocked out windows and doors, the impact fell on the ventilation systems of houses, and part of the wall of a building on the territory of a zinc plant collapsed. The Ural Lightning ice palace and the buildings of the Yuzhno-Uralsky state university. The impact zone of the shock wave on the surface was about 130 kilometers long and 50 kilometers wide.

On the map of the village and city, where the glass was knocked out by the shock wave, a characteristic “butterfly” was formed, the wings of which were deployed perpendicular to the flight path of the car. Researchers of the Tunguska event found approximately the same “butterfly” on the forest fall map almost a hundred years ago. After the Tunguska meteorite, this is the first time in Russia when the invasion of a fireball into the atmosphere was accompanied by destruction.

There were no casualties in the emergency, but more than 1.6 thousand people were injured, mainly due to cuts from broken windows.

Economic damage from a meteorite fall in the Chelyabinsk region exceeded 1.2 billion rubles.

The fall of a meteorite was captured for the first time in history. The proof is large number eyewitnesses, videos, photographs and instrumental data collected by the expedition of the Russian Academy of Sciences. An unprecedentedly rapid and fairly complete scientific analysis of the event was carried out, including the effects that accompanied it.

According to NASA, on February 15 at 9:20.20 local time, a meteorite entered the Earth's atmosphere near the border between Russia and Kazakhstan. It moved from the direction of the Sun in a western direction. Due to its small angle with respect to the Sun (about 15 degrees), the meteorite was not detected by asteroid observation systems. In addition, modern telescopes are focused on searching for asteroids (inert cosmic rock bodies) larger than 100 meters in diameter (by modern ideas, starting from this size, cosmic bodies can cause catastrophic destruction on Earth), and according to scientists, initial size The Chelyabinsk meteorite was less than 20 meters, and therefore the penetration of this space object into the atmosphere went unnoticed.

13 seconds later, the meteorite, which by this time had turned into a bright fireball, reached the peak of its luminosity at an altitude of 23.3 kilometers, practically ceasing to exist. On Earth, this event was observed as a powerful explosion, after which the bolide continued its movement, but significantly weakened its brightness and after a few seconds disappeared completely.

American seismologists recorded the moment the body exploded - a shock of magnitude 4.0 was observed approximately a kilometer southwest of the center of Chelyabinsk. Russian seismic stations recorded an earthquake accompanying the explosion with a magnitude of 3.2 in the area of ​​Yemanzhelinsk, located 50 kilometers from Chelyabinsk. For comparison, the fall of the Tunguska meteorite caused an earthquake, the magnitude of which is estimated at 5.0.

The first estimates of the power of the explosion near Chelyabinsk, obtained from infrasound stations of the Comprehensive Prohibition Organization nuclear tests, gave a value of about 470 kilotons of TNT, later data from infrasound stations in Russia and Kazakhstan – 570 kilotons. At the same time, optical and infrared observation data from satellites showed that energy equivalent to 90 kilotons was “exposed” in the form of radiation alone, which corresponds to the total explosion energy of 590 kilotons (plus or minus 50).

The bolide began to glow at an altitude of 97.1 kilometers when it entered the atmosphere at a speed of 19.16 kilometers per second. It reached its highest brightness at an altitude of 29.7 kilometers - at this moment its brightness reached a magnitude of minus 27.3, despite the fact that the magnitude of the Sun is minus 26.7, which means that the fireball shone about 30 times brighter.

Scientists estimated the mass of the object before entering the atmosphere at 13 thousand tons, and its transverse size at 19.8 meters (according to other estimates from 16 to 19 meters).

Only 4-6 tons of meteorite substance reached the ground, which is 0.03-0.05% of the original mass, while 76% of the substance evaporated, and the rest turned into dust. The explosion of the fireball led to the appearance of a giant dust ring in upper layers atmosphere, which encircled the entire northern hemisphere of the Earth and remained in the stratosphere for at least three months after this event.

The largest piece of meteorite weighing 654 kilograms was lifted in the fall of 2013 from Lake Chebarkul (Chelyabinsk region) from a depth of 20 meters. When weighed, it split, and a fragment weighing 540 kilograms was transferred to the Chelyabinsk State Museum of Local Lore. Later, his weight began to decrease due to the evaporation of water that entered him while in the lake. In 2015, he weighed 503.3 kilograms. Another meteorite fragment became an exhibit at the French National Museum of Natural History.

Studies of fragments of a celestial body have shown that this is an ordinary chondrite of type LL5 - one of the types of stony meteorites. Its age is about 4.45 billion years. Approximately 290 million years ago, the Chelyabinsk meteorite experienced a major catastrophe - a collision with another cosmic body. This is evidenced by dark veins in its thickness - traces of melting of the substance during a powerful impact. However, scientists believe that this was a very “fast” process. The traces of cosmic particles - the tracks of iron nuclei - did not have time to melt, which means that the “accident” itself lasted no more than a few minutes. At the same time, it is possible that traces of melting could have appeared during the asteroid’s too close approach to the Sun, according to scientists from the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy (IGM) SB RAS.

Scientists from the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences stated that the space object once broke off from a relatively large asteroid.

Chemical analysis showed that traces remained in the meteorite organic compounds containing sulfur and oxygen. After the fireball explosion, residents smelled sulfur or a burning smell for a whole day, which appeared an hour after the explosion.

Scientists calculated that the Chelyabinsk cosmic body was located in the main asteroid belt of the Solar System, the region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, where the trajectories of many small bodies pass. The orbits of some of them, in particular, the Apollo and Aten group asteroids, are elongated and can cross the Earth’s orbit.

The Chelyabinsk meteorite turned out to be the largest known celestial body to fall to Earth since the Tunguska meteorite in 1908. Such an event occurs on average once every 100 years, and according to some data, more often, up to five times a century.

After the fall of a meteorite in the Chelyabinsk region, the “space threat” worries specialists more and more. Scientists have found that small asteroids about one meter in size enter the Earth's atmosphere and disintegrate there about once every two weeks. Humanity is not yet able to oppose anything to larger space objects. Scientists also emphasize that cosmic bodies coming from the daytime sky cannot be detected in a timely manner using any ground-based means.

For this reason, NASA, Roscosmos and other space agencies are actively working on developing systems for detecting asteroids even before approaching the Earth, and are thinking about creating “space defense” means.

The first product of this kind was the Scout system, developed by NASA and successfully tested in the fall of 2016. She discovered an asteroid with a diameter of five to 25 meters and determined the distance to which it would approach the Earth, five days before its approach to the planet. In 2018, NASA plans to launch into orbit a whole brood of NEA Scout microsatellites, which will help the ground-based “scout” fill the gaps in knowledge about asteroids like the one in Chelyabinsk. When such an object approaches the Earth, one of the probes will fly up to it, take detailed photographs of its surface, and also “feel” it to study the structure of its interior and chemical composition.

In Russia, in 2016, the RAS Space Council approved the parameters of a project to create a system for monitoring cosmic bodies. The research projects are called "System for the detection of daytime asteroids" (SODA) and "SODA-detection". The system will make it possible to detect celestial bodies with a diameter of more than ten meters four hours before the expected time of entry into the atmosphere. The SODA project involves the construction of a spacecraft that will be sent to one of the Lagrange points - L1, located at a distance of one and a half million kilometers from Earth. It is planned to place a telescope there that will examine the space around the Earth.

At the beginning of 2018, scientists reported that Russia had begun to develop a system for tracking dangerous asteroids, Nebosvod, consisting of two constellations of satellites - in Earth and solar orbits. It is being developed by the Russian corporation Kometa.

In the meantime, no country is technically capable of destroying space objects in the atmosphere like the Chelyabinsk meteorite.

I deliberately paused so as not to create myths and mysteries without more or less reliable facts. Now that such facts already exist, it is time to systematize the information.

Where did the meteorite fall?

So, on the morning of February 15, 2013, at 9.20 local time (at 7.20 Moscow time), a meteoroid - that is, a celestial body smaller in size than an asteroid - entered the Earth’s surface at a very acute angle. If such a body reaches the surface of the planet, it is called a meteorite, and if it burns up in dense layers of the atmosphere, it is called a meteor. IN in this case the meteoroid exploded in the air at an altitude of approximately 15 to 25 km and its numerous fragments reached the Earth. The largest fragment supposedly fell into Lake Chebarkul, which is located a kilometer from the city of the same name in the Chelyabinsk region (78 km west of Chelyabinsk). The weight of this fragment is believed to be between 200 and 500 kg. In addition, the very next day, enthusiasts of the Ural Federal meteorite expedition began collecting small fragments of the heavenly guest. The total of all collected fragments is about at the moment about 3 kg. In addition to the vicinity of Lake Chebarkul, fragments were found in the southern suburbs of Chelyabinsk - Pervomaisky, Yemanzhelinka, Deputatsky. Scientists also suggest the possibility of finding fragments also in the area of ​​the village of Shchapino and the village of Travniki.

Consequences of a meteorite fall

The explosion of a meteoroid in the atmosphere caused numerous destructions in Chelyabinsk and its surroundings. Fortunately, there were no deaths, but many people suffered from glass broken by the shock wave. More than 1,600 people received various injuries, of which 69 were so serious that they required hospitalization. At the moment, all the victims have already been discharged from hospitals.

Most of the damage was caused by broken glass (the windows of about 3,000 houses were damaged to one degree or another), but at the Chelyabinsk Zinc Plant the damage was more serious - the roof was destroyed and some walls of the buildings were damaged. In the very first information that began to arrive immediately after the disaster, this particular plant was called the site of the meteorite fall. But now we can say with confidence that the destruction was caused by a shock wave from an explosion equivalent to 100-200 kilotons of TNT. For comparison, the energy of the first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima was no more than 18 kilotons.

The diameter of the meteoroid at the time of the explosion was approximately 17 m, its weight was about 10 tons, and its speed was 18 km/s.

Immediately after the disaster, they began to calculate the damage, which multiplied in geometric progression. There were anecdotal situations where people themselves broke the windows in their homes after hearing about compensation for victims of the explosion.

In addition, offers for the sale of meteorite fragments immediately began to appear on the Internet, and the total weight of these “finds” exceeded not only the weight of the one already found at that time, but also the entire meteorite.

Previously, it was proposed to name the meteorite “Chebarkul”, but later settled on the name “Chelyabinsk”.

After the fall of the Tunguska meteorite in 1908 on the territory of our country, only once did we encounter a phenomenon of this magnitude - in 1947 in the Primorsky Territory on Far East A meteorite with a total mass of about 23 tons fell in the Sikhote-Alin mountains. Based on the name of the area, it was called Sikhote-Alinsky.

A compilation of videos filmed by eyewitnesses.