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Tuesday, 8 October, 2002, 11:05 GMT 12:05 UK Cash plea for Russian meteor chasers The impact happened in Siberia on Thursday By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor Scientists investigating what is believed to be a "significant" fresh meteor crater in a remote part of Siberia are begging for funds to mount an expedition. A British meteorite expert has called on the international scientific community to help Russian scientists get to the impact site, which may be of major scientific importance. It is imperative that US and UK funding bodies to support our Russian colleagues in their investigation...

Athletes who top the podium on Feb. 15, 2014 will receive special medals with pieces of the Chelyabinsk meteor that broke up over the remote Russian community on that day in 2013, according to media reports.

Some of the asteroid's remnants crashed to the ground, but hundreds of tons of dust remained in the atmosphere. A team led by NASA Goddard atmospheric physicist Nick Gorkavyi, who is from Chelyabinsk, wondered if it was possible to track the cloud using NASA's Suomi NPP satellite. "Indeed, we saw the formation of a new dust belt in Earth's stratosphere, and achieved the first space-based observation of the long-term evolution of a bolide plume," Gorkavyi said in a statement. Initial measurements 3.5 hours after the meteor explosion showed the dust 25 miles high in the atmosphere, speeding east at 190...

NASA's checked its space rock maths and it's not good news "If you look at the number of impacts detected by US government sensors over the past few decades you find the impact rate of kiloton-class objects is greater than would be indicated by the telescopic surveys," said Bill Cooke, meteoroid environment office lead at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center at a press conference on Wednesday. "Over the past few decades we've seen an impact rate about seven times greater than the current state of the telescopic surveys would indicate."

[T]he object [was] an asteroid 17 to 20 metres across ... with a mass of 10,000 tones [and] exploded at an altitude of about 30 kilometres. The initial explosion carried an energy equivalent to about 500 kilotonnes of TNT. The explosion of the object caused] flying glass, which injured more than a thousand people and collapsed one building. Of 374 injured people who responded to an internet survey ..., the most common complaint related to eyes – 180 people said their eyes hurt and 70 were temporarily blinded. But 20 also reported sunburn; one was burned so badly that his...

The fragment is so large that divers have been unable to lift it. Instead, it's been dragged along the bottom of the lake on a metal sheet. At 1,257 pounds--that's 570 kilos--It will be almost as big as the Holsinger meteorite, which landed in Arizona 50,000 years ago, and broke the scales when it was weighed earlier today. The rock will be tested to verify that it is from space and not from somewhere more mundane.

YEKATERINBURG, September 25 (RIA Novosti) – While removing silt in an effort to fish out a huge chunk of meteorite from the bottom of a lake in Russia’s Urals, divers recovered a smaller meteorite on Tuesday, scientists said. “A meteorite chunk roughly the size of a human fist has been lifted from the depth of 13 meters [43 feet] in Lake Chebarkul,” the Urals Federal University said in a statement. According to scientists, the [remaining] huge chunk, weighting hundreds of metric tons, is buried under a 2.5-meter (8.2-foot) layer of silt. Scientists expect to remove the silt around it on...

The Chelyabinsk meteorite either collided with another body in the solar system or came too close to the Sun before it fell to Earth, according to research announced today (Tuesday 27th August) at the Goldschmidt conference in Florence. "...We hope to find out more once the main body of the meteorite is raised from Chebarkul Lake," [says Dr Sharygin]. Surprisingly, the IGM team also found small quantities of platinum group elements in the meteorite's fusion crust. The team are only able to identify these elements as an alloy of osmium, iridium and platinum, but its presence is unusual as the...

Network of stations with seismometers and air pressure sensors detected the blast waves A network of seismographic stations recorded spectacular signals from the blast waves of the meteor that landed near Chelyabinsk, Russia, as the waves crossed the United States. The National Science Foundation- (NSF) supported stations are used to study earthquakes and the Earth's deep interior. While thousands of earthquakes around the globe are recorded by seismometers in these stations--part of the permanent Global Seismographic Network (GSN) and EarthScope's temporary Transportable Array (TA)--signals from large meteor impacts are far less common. The meteor explosion near Chelyabinsk on Feb. 15,...

Explanation: Each day on planet Earth can have a serene beginning at sunrise as the sky gently grows bright over a golden eastern horizon. This sunrise panorama seems to show such a moment on the winter morning of February 15. In the mist, a calm, mirror-like stretch of the Miass River flows through the foreground along a frosty landscape near Chelyabinsk, Russia. But the long cloud wafting through the blue sky above is the evolving persistent train of the Chelyabinsk Meteor. The vapor trail was left by the space rock that exploded over the city only 18 minutes earlier, causing...

Trajectory apparently began in near-Earth asteroid group ApolloAstroboffins have figured out where the Chelaybinsk meteorite came from using the power of maths and videos shot by witnesses in Russia.Click here for VideoJorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin of the University of Antioquia in Colombia have come up with a preliminary reconstruction of the orbit of the meteor, which smashed into the city in the Urals completely unexpectedly two weeks ago. By combing through the witness videos and using trigonometry, the astronomers have determined that the meteorite came from the Apollo class of asteroids in our Solar System's space rock belt. The...

Poring over crowd-sourced footage, researchers Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin from the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia, were able to use "simple trigonometry to calculate the height, speed, and position of the rock as it fell to Earth," says BBC News. More importantly, the duo was able to find out where Russia's most famous meteor was likely born. Using astronomy software developed by the U.S. Naval Observatory, Zuluaga and Ferrin gathered enough data to trace the meteoroid's origins in outer space. The information included the meteor's relative angle to the horizon, the shadows it cast, and video timestamps of...

Explanation: What in heaven's blazes is that? Thousands of people living near the Ural Mountains in Russia saw last Friday morning one of the more spectacular meteors of modern times streak across the sky. Forceful sound waves arrived at the ground minutes later, knocking people over and breaking windows for hundreds of kilometers. The above video is a compilation of several car dashcams and includes real time footage of the meteor rampaging, smoke trails drifting, shadows quickly shifting, and even the meteor's light reflecting off the back of a bus. The fireball is thought to have been caused by a...

Explanation: There it goes. That small spot moving in front of background stars in the above video is a potentially dangerous asteroid passing above the Earth's atmosphere. This past Friday, the 50-meter wide asteroid 2012 DA14 just missed the Earth, passing not only inside the orbit of the Moon, which is unusually close for an asteroid of this size, but also inside the orbit of geosynchronous satellites. Unfortunately, asteroids this big or bigger strike the Earth every 1000 years or so. Were 2012 DA14 to have hit the Earth, it could have devastated a city-sized landscape, or stuck an ocean...

Video Linky Here

Russia's authorities on Friday cautioned residents of the Urals to stay away from any unidentified objects after a meteor dramatically burned up above the region, with a precious meteorite apparently plunging into a local lake.

In light of what happened yesterday, this story is even more relevant now. It was written before the meteor event in Russia.Asteroid 2012 DA14 makes its closest approach at 2:24 p.m. EST/1924 GMT today. One wonders if yesterdayÂ’s meteor in Russia wasnÂ’t some parts of the asteroid fragmented in a deep space collision eons ago and in a similar trajectory hours ahead. It may also be simply coincidence. [UPDATE: NASA has issued a statement on this, see below.]While politicians, their activist friends, and pundits caterwaul over a few tenths of a degree change in the global temperature over the last...

Pretty spectacular — and a little frightening, one might imagine, if one of these streaked across your field of vision.  Russia Today’s English-language service reports on the phenomenon observed over the last several hours, which also shattered windows in the Urals region as the meteor exploded in the atmosphere (via The Corner):

<p>No sooner do we write about the conspiracy theories flourishing on Russian social media about the meteor, which sailed over central Russia on Friday, than an actual member of the Russian government weighs in with his own. Or so the Moscow-sponsored outlet Voice of Russia says.</p>

Moscow (CNN) -- A meteor streaked through the skies above Russia's Urals region Friday morning, before exploding with a flash and boom that shattered glass in buildings and left about 1,000 people hurt The number of injured has continued to rise through the day as new reports come in from across a swath of central Russia. Most of those hurt are in the Chelyabinsk region, the news agency said. The vast majority of injuries are not thought to be serious. About 3,000 buildings have sustained damage -- mostly broken glass -- as a result of the shock waves caused by...