Insight into space collisions from Chelyabinsk fireball
Scientists from the Czech Republic, Finland, and the Russian Federation are presenting today new findings on meteorites recovered after the Chelyabinsk fireball that exploded over Russia on February 15, 2013. The report was presented by Dr. Maria Gritsevich (Finnish Geodetic Institute and Russian Academy of Science) and Dr. Tomas Kohout (University of Helsinki, Finland, and Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic) to the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Denver, CO. The results are of special interest because they not only shed light on potentially hazardous impacts of asteroids on Earth, but also on more violent space collisions which disrupted ancient protoplanets in the early solar system into smaller asteroids we observe today.