- Title: RUSSIA: Locals claim to have found Russian meteorite fragments
- Date: 18th February 2013
- Summary: CHELYABINSK REGION, RUSSIA (FEBRUARY 15, 2013) (ORIGINALLY 4:3) (AMATEUR VIDEO) VARIOUS WHITE CLOUD, TRAIL OF METEORITE (SONDBITE) (Russian) LOCAL RESIDENT MIKHAIL, SAYING: "I'm reporting from Lake Chebarkul where a meteorite fell a couple of hours ago. If you can see, behind me a team from the Emergencies Ministry, a helicopter searching for meteorite." SEARCH TEAM ON
- Embargoed: 5th March 2013 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Russian Federation
- Country: Russia
- Topics: Quirky,Science / Technology,Space
- Reuters ID: LVAAGMWWJ635W3M12QJGPEKGMESQ
- Story Text: Two days after a meteorite exploded over Cheliabinsk region in the Russian Ural mountains new amateur videos kept emerging of a space object travelling in the sky.
The explosion that happened on Friday (February 15) damaged buildings and shattered windows, showering people with broken glass. Part of the meteorite fell into a lake about hundred kilometres from the city of Chelyabinsk.
The meteorite caused quite a stir among the villagers residing around Lake Chebarkul where the meteorite formed a several meter wide hole in thick ice covering the frozen lake.
"I'm reporting from Lake Chebarkul where a meteorite fell a couple of hours ago. If you can see, behind me a team from the Emergencies Ministry, a helicopter searching for meteorite," said a local resident Mikhail who posed in front of his camera on the bank of the lake where the search team has already been looking for meteorite remnants.
Another one local resident claimed he has found a dozen of tiny fragments. He refused to give his name.
Search teams said they had found small objects up to about 1 cm (half-an-inch) wide that might be fragments of a meteorite, but no larger pieces.
Residents of Chelyabinsk, an industrial city 1,500 km (950 miles) east of Moscow, heard an explosion, saw a bright light and then felt a shockwave that blew out windows and damaged the wall and roof of a zinc plant.
The fireball travelling at a speed of 30 km (19 miles) per second according to Russian space agency Roscosmos, blazed across the horizon, leaving a long white trail visible as far as 200 km (125 miles) away. The Chelyabinsk regional governor have said the strike caused about 1 billion roubles ($33 million) worth of damage.
At a news conference in Moscow on Monday (February 18) scientists opened a debate on possible early warning system for space object posing danger for Earth.
"You first need to calculate from what distance you want to see a dangerous object. At present we consider an acceptable distance to be five million kilometres or at least one million. In that case you would be a few few days ahead. You would be able to calculate the trajectory, issue a warning for a city, and perhaps prepare a future anti-asteroid missile. We don't have them so far, nobody knows how to build one, and few who think about it," said Vladimir Lipunov, head of the space monitoring laboratory with Moscow state university.
Lipunov said world needs to move quickly in developing a network of long range telescopes that would cover the whole planet.
"What do we need? I need at least a telescope capable of seeing at the range of one million kilometres an object like the one that flew yesterday at least," he said. "How many telescopes do we need? That depends on the field of view. It is now possible to build telescopes of 4-8 square degrees. We need 10 to 20 telescopes around the Earth, dozens of them."
NASA estimated the Cheliabinsk meteorite was 55 feet (17 metres) across before entering Earth's atmosphere and weighed about 10,000 tons. It exploded miles above Earth, releasing nearly 500 kilotons of energy - about 30 times the size of the nuclear bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War Two, NASA added. - Copyright Holder: AMATEUR VIDEO (CAN SELL)
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