What We Now Know About The Chelyabinsk Meteor
Chelyabinsk Fragment Science/AAAS Months after a 62-foot-wide fireball streaked through the morning sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia, scientists are starting to get a handle on the rock's composition, trajectory and impact. Three papers released this week, two in Nature today and one forthcoming in Science tomorrow, reconstruct the event, finding that the superbolide (a bright fireball) was even larger than we previously thought, and that the risk of meteorites of this size hitting the earth may be underestimated. The papers confirm that the meteorite was an ordinary chondrite, the same stony rock that Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft recovered from the asteroid Itokawa in 2010. It likely originated from the Flora asteroid family in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (For a refresher on the differences between meteors, meteorites and asteroids, see here). Impact Site ...