Meteor

 

   In February, 2013 a meteor exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in the southern Ural Mountains. Scientists at the time were watching a different meteor that was passing close to the Earth. No one was aware of the Chelyabinsk meteor because it came from the direction of the sun. 

   The 60 feet in diameter, 10,000 ton meteor exploded about 25 miles south of the city center at a height of 18 miles. At that height, most of its force of the explosion was absorbed by the atmosphere. Still, the blast wave injured 15,000 people in the region, mostly from window glass, and damaged 7,200 buildings.

   There are a dozen excellent videos of the meteor streaking across the sky, mostly from dashboard cameras. Most drivers in Russia have dash cams to support their accident claims in the corrupt traffic courts. As the videos were studied, scientists warned that we had better improve our methods of detecting meteors or else we could go the way of the dinosaurs.

  The dinosaurs (except for birds) went extinct 66 million years ago. The best theory is that an asteroid collided with the Earth.  This asteroid, many times bigger than the Chelyabinsk meteor, landed off Mexico's Pacific coast and filled the atmosphere with debris, causing a dark, cold period. Only smaller creatures such as our ancestors survived.

  On this day in 1908, an asteroid three times the size and many times more powerful than the Chelyabinsk meteor exploded over Siberia. YouTube does not have a video of it.  Russia was busy with revolutions and a world war in those days and it wasn't until 1921 that a scientific party was sent to the remote area. No one had been injured, though several peasants were thrown out of bed. Three people were unaccounted for. An estimated 80 million trees were flattened over an area of 840 square miles.

 So what has been done to protect Earth from an asteroid strike?

In 1998 the movie Armageddon was released in which a huge rogue asteroid threatens to destroy the Earth. Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and others land on the asteroid and plant a nuclear bomb to blow it up.

That same year Congress directed NASA to discover and track all near-Earth objects larger than one kilometer. This task was accomplished just in time to miss the Chelyabinsk meteor. To be fair, the Chelyabinsk meteor was much smaller than a kilometer.

In 2022 NASA successfully tested its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) by crashing a spacecraft into a small asteroid to divert its course. Nuclear bombs are for the movies.

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